Apartments.com Teams Up With VirtualRelocation, MoverQuotes.com

Apartments.com signed separate agreements with VirtualRelocation, an established relocation resource, and MoverQuotes, an online moving company database.

The agreements will enhance Apartments.com’s Moving Center, which provides people who are relocating a directory of services and information. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Located at www.movingcenter.com and also available through Apartments.com’s national site, the Moving Center now includes dozens of links provided by VirtualRelocation, in addition to display ads for truck rental, furniture rental, storage services and school and child care information.

“This agreement gives VirtualRelocation yet another opportunity to serve the relocating public and companies with relocating employees. Visitors to Apartments.com’s Moving Center will be able to tap our free resources to ease the stress of relocation,” said Scott Taylor, president of VirtualRelocation.

MoverQuotes.com, a service of Norwood, Microsurf Internet Services Inc. and also newly available through the Moving Center, is designed to enable people to compare relocation costs based on the distance and size of their move.

By estimating the miles between the state of origin and the state of destination and the approximate weight of the move, MoverQuotes.com generates a customized directory from its database of more than 1,000 moving companies. Results include the cost of the move, contact information and any additional charges for packing, appliances, flights of stairs and insurance.

As part of the relationship, Apartments.com will be featured on a button on the home page of the MoverQuotes.com site as well as on the home pages of Microsurf’s other four sites: realtorquotes.com, homequotes.com, mortgagequotes.com and insurequotes.com.

Offered as a service of Apartments.com, the Moving Center is featured on the Real Estate page of AT&T WorldNet’s private and public service as well as within Apartment.com’s interactive area on America Online. The Moving Center is also the anchor tenant of America Online’s Real Estate/Moving Area.

Launched on the Internet as Apartments Plus in January 1997, the company was acquired by newspaper consortium Classified Ventures LLC in December and re-launched as Apartments.com in March 1998. Apartments.com currently represents more than 600,000 apartments in major markets across 40 states.

Through its ownership by Classified Ventures, Apartments.com will also begin distributing its content via a network of more than 130 newspaper Web sites–including those of The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune–and incorporating the newspapers’ local apartment classified advertising listings to its existing national database.