Cutting Out the Cons - The Village Voice's Backpage.com Streamlines Site.NEW YORK New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of -- When you were looking online for your New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. apartment last year, how long did you spend wading through thousands of listings, half of which were seriously misleading or had hidden fees? Far too long, if you're like most patrons of major online classified websites. You may have also had at least one of the following actual real estate experiences: * Meeting a broker on the street who arrives by way of rollerblade and has forgotten the keys to the apartment at the gym. * Being pressured by a broker to sign a lease in the next ten minutes on a brownstone brownstone, red to brown variety of sandstone. Its unusual color is caused in some instances by the presence of red iron oxide which acts as a cement, binding the sand grains together. stoop. Even surfaces not handy? You can use the broker's back. No problem - really. * Carefully trimming down your cut-and-paste list of 275 ads to a promising 17, only to realize once you arrive they are all the exact same apartment. * Forking over an extra "incentive" bonus - on top of that hidden broker fee - so the landlord will "reserve" your application's spot in line. (Cash only, please.) This May, the Village Voice's Backpage.com is streamlining renting in New York City by charging a nominal fee to wipe out scammers and reduce deliberate cross-categorization. Last month alone, the paper's free premium classifieds site received a far-fetched 80,000 posts advertising "available" New York apartments. "We're going to flush out the triple-posters and con artists clogging unwieldy, overcrowded o·ver·crowd v. o·ver·crowd·ed, o·ver·crowd·ing, o·ver·crowds v.tr. To cause to be excessively crowded: a system of consolidation that only overcrowded the classrooms. sites," said Michael Cohen Michael Cohen may refer to:
v. starved, starv·ing, starves v.intr. 1. To suffer or die from extreme or prolonged lack of food. 2. Informal To be hungry. 3. To suffer from deprivation. for." For the price of a subway ride, an ad on Backpage.com will reach the Voice's dynamic and active readership, a population most likely to move each year. Currently free categories will remain so. In the three years since it began, Backpage.com has catapulted into the top seven classified sites nationwide, with penetration into more than seventy* major American markets. The site boasts affiliation with some of the most prestigious newspapers in the country, including the Dallas Observer The Dallas Observer is a free alternative weekly newspaper distributed around the Dallas, Texas (USA) area. At its inception, it was conceived as a weekly local arts and cinema review publication, with the credo "Advocate for Excellence in the Arts" on the cover. , LA Weekly, Phoenix New Times and many others. Backpage.com was founded in 2004 by Village Voice Media. *Media Metrix Key Measures Report - Classified Directories and Resources [c] 2007 |
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