As students head home for the holidays, the Collegian Media Group has a present waiting for any and all looking to find a new place to call home.
As part of an initiative to provide localized content for Students and Greater Manhattan residents with off-campus housing, MHKhousing.com will assist any potential renter with a concise, tabulated inventory of listings beginning in January.
Those in the community may make use of the range of options included on this site, such as Distance from Campus (1 – 10 miles or less), Bedroom/Bathroom layout, Price ($0 – >$1000) and Management (Both Privately Owned and MHKhousing.com) allowing them to make decisions on their terms.
After they have clicked on a property, potential renters can examine photos, the location of the property on Google Maps, floor plans, amenities and rental terms. With ease in mind, listings they found interesting are stored in the “My Favorites” tab and a contact info portion allows renters and property owners to communicate behind the scenes.
Mock Listing for MHKhousing.com
Illustration courtesy of Collegian Media Group
Daren Lee Lewis, advertising adviser for the Kansas State Collegian, said alternatively the website’s “Guides Tab” offers an experience where you don’t just find a rental property, but are connected to stories and information from other students.
“This site offers a real kind of firsthand, personal experience about the rental process versus some of
these larger companies that just have a Manhattan tab where they just will have some properties there,” Lewis said. “It’s very focused towards K-state students and it’s going to be ran by K-state students and this is a completely different experience.”
With concerns in the community about the state of finding rental properties during a Pandemic, MHKhousing.com will be an outlet for those looking to avoid in-person investigation and not likely to be hindered by the economic drawbacks being seen elsewhere. It was reported earlier Friday that Riley County was reporting 114 new positive COVID-19 cases and 73 recoveries since Wednesday.
“With the Corona situation, businesses will be able to put up video guided tours so that they don’t have to have that contact with students looking at it in person, and I think that’s gonna be a big thing right now,” Lewis said. “[We do] whatever we can to help that process go along. Some of the students that maybe have been taking classes remotely, and are planning to come on campus next year, this is a way if you’re out of town to be able to look at your properties without necessarily having to come to town to look.”
Ira David Levy, director of the Collegian Media Group, said he is working to have his student reporters cover more of the community and delivering papers out to the region to help build trust.
“We are offering a service geared toward K-state students, but also to members on the outside of K-state,” Levy said. “One group that is important is the military. People like retiring here, as a place to go, and to look to live. [The website] kind of brings members with all different factors from the community together and that’s really what I see it as in the end.”
Dominique McGlynn, advertising assistant manager at the Kansas State Collegian, said she had been drawn to real estate and desired to be a part of the effort of this program as she didn’t have access to this sort of resource herself after transitioning from the military.
“When I first got here out of the service, I didn’t know where to live,” McGlynn said. “I did all my searching online, it literally took forever, and I would have really appreciated this website when I first got here to campus. So this is
definitely why I like working on this website.”
McGlynn also stated that this site offers advantages largely because it resembles the Collegian as a whole, a nonprofit media organization made of students working for the students.
“You have all your students working in an office, and for us to create a website that is so high profile, I think that is amazing for us right now,” McGlynn said. “I think that’s definitely something that other schools would definitely be looking into doing to copy us and having us as that trendsetter. ”
Going forward this site will offer a contact-less, consolidated catalogue of properties, so renters don’t have to wade through a litany of websites and realtors to find the housing they need.
To discover the properties being offered and learn more, the website can be accessed at https://www.mhkhousing.com/
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