Our website is used by the whole Penn community (students, faculty, staff), including the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital. In addition, according to our records affiliates of the other universities in the area as close as Drexel University, University of Sciences in Philadelphia and as far as Temple University are locating housing using our services. In the course of one year, our homepage gets about 125,000 hits and several thousand more still use our office in person.
While most of our listings are for the University City/West Philadelphia and Center City areas, University affiliates choose to live in many other areas of Philadelphia and its vicinity. Such neighborhoods are quite popular and there is a good likelihood that your listing will appeal to somebody using our services to look for housing.
You will have to pay the fee for 10 units, even if at one particular time you only need to list one available unit. Please note that this is an annual fee, and you can, at any time during the year, list any one of your 10 properties, for as long as necessary, making changes, deletions, etc., either by calling our office or by getting your own password and accessing your account information on line.
You must become an annual subscriber, pay a fee based on the number of units you own and/or manage in the Greater Philadelphia area and agree to the terms of our listing policy. Apart from the requirement that you comply with all the housing rules and regulations valid in Philadelphia - possess proper licensing, comply with the property maintenance code requirements and keep property up to code at all times -, we ask that you agree to attempt resolution of landlord tenant concerns by working with our office, if or before legal action becomes necessary. For the text of the entire listing policy, click here.
No, you cannot. We will not post ads that are discriminatory and that violate the FAIR HOUSING LAWS and the Philadelphia Fair Housing regulations. Landlords are not permitted to discriminate against families with children. For additional information about FAIR HOUSING, see the Partners for Good Housing PDF document.
While as a homeowner living in the house where the rental unit is located you are not bound by the same Fair Housing rules as owners who do not live on the property are bound by, you will not be able to advertize such a rental restriction, because we cannot post ads that are discriminatory in nature. You can choose not to rent to a family with children but you cannot use advertising as a way of getting your tenants.
No, they are not. We ask our subscribers to represent that the units comply with the housing code requirements and that their housing practices are in compliance with the law, however, we do not verify properties or endorse them. Read our disclaimer here.
Yes, OCS reserves the right to refuse to accept and/or to delist properties with code violations and landlords engaging in unfair and/or illegal practices. Click here for more information.
