RentHop's College and University Scholarship Program

Apartment hunting can be overwhelming, often compared to a marathon and a sprint at the same time. A successful transaction will require the stamina and endurance to visit possibly dozens of addresses and listings to find the perfect home, while also requiring enough decisiveness and organization to quickly secure a discovered rare gem before losing it to the competition. We have built a platform and service that modernizes many aspects of real estate transactions, beginning with the home search.

To apply, submit an essay under 500 words that concisely answers the question:

Submit your essay under 500 words using our Scholarship Application Form.

You must be a current student in an eligible undergraduate program or a graduating high school senior, working towards a bachelor's degree or associate's degree.

Awards include the following:

* RentHop will check with the recipient’s school to confirm their policy on external scholarship checks. If required, scholarship checks will be sent directly to the recipient’s school.

Our story begins in 2008 when the two co-founders, Lawrence and Lee, each independently had very bad apartment search experiences in NYC. They had only been out of college a few years and wondered why in this day and age, technology had not yet solved or at least greatly reduced the pain of finding a rental home.

In Lee's case, he called a broker advertising a rent-stabilized apartment on Craigslist. Little did he know he would eventually agree to spend all day with the agent looking at a half dozen apartments, none of which were as attractive as the originally advertised one, and none that were actually rent-stabilized. Within a year of moving to NYC, Lee eventually solved his personal rental problem permanently: he purchased a co-op apartment near Bryant Park where he still lives to this day!

Lawrence was fortunate enough to room with some close college friends during his early years in Manhattan. After a short stint downtown in the Financial District, he shared a condo in Midtown Manhattan with a fellow University of Pennsylvania alumni. Eventually, it was time for Lawrence to find his own studio. However, despite knowing exactly where in the city he wanted to live, he still jumped through far too many hoops only to move one block from where he had lived previously. Like Lee, he kept wondering at every step along the way why things were so painful.

Apartment hunting is stressful and overwhelming. We know finding a new home is definitely not about looking at every possible advertised apartment. It's about looking at the best apartments that fit your criteria. After all, you will eventually only pick one of them. The game is about quality over quantity.

Using quantitative algorithms and nerdy technology, we created RentHop, a site that sorts listings by quality. We know you don't want to see listings without photos or waste time with unresponsive landlords and brokers. Even today, most other sites sort by price or the posting date. RentHop relies on our HopScore, a sophisticated set of algorithms that ranks apartment listings by quality, so only the best rise to the top.

We currently allow searching for NYC apartments (including no fee apartments), Boston apartments, Chicago apartments, along with most major U.S. cities. Visit RentHop.com for more information about our search product.

Submit your essay under 500 words using our Scholarship Application Form.For any questions, please contact college-scholarship@renthop.com

Please see the scholarship terms, conditions, guidelines, and policies for more information.

You must apply using your school email address. If your school does not provide one or does not allow students to send/receive external emails via the school affiliated email address, then you may still apply using your personal email. We will ultimately need to verify your eligibility upon submission via a PDF file of your acceptance letter or proof of enrollment to the Undergraduate or Associates program. Please submit by midnight (Eastern Time) of each application deadline.

Application deadlines (Recipient notified within 30 days of each deadline):

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