The state wants to sell landlords some free marketing.

In exchange for their listings data, landlords can get their properties promoted on the new Web site www.CTHousingSearch.org, a free housing registry to help people find accessible and affordable rental housing. The site, developed by the state Department of Economic and Community Development and the nonprofit SocialServe.com, allows property managers and owners to list properties, describe amenities, provide photos and list eligibility requirements.

When it’s fully operational, renters will be able to search up-to-date vacancies and get contact information. In addition, units accessible for people with disabilities will be identified.

“This whole thing rides on landlord participation,” said Michael Santoro, community development specialist at DECD.

Some pieces of the site already are up and running, such as a resource page linking visitors to municipality profiles and various state agencies, such as the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Social Services and the Housing Finance Authority. But the key component of the site will be the searchable database designed to help potential tenants find affordable, accessible and market-rate rental housing.

“The intention is for it to be a very diverse site for people with various housing needs,” Santoro said. “Our focus is on landlords who have, or are associated with, affordable housing.”

All that is needed now are the listings.

“We expect the landlords to make a push as far as getting their listings into the database,” Santoro said.

‘Really High Hopes’

DECD, which expects the site to have an annual maintenance budget of $50,000, is marketing free access to the service to both landlords and tenants. In late June, DECD launched a mailing campaign, sending out information on the Web site to 22,000 landlords statewide.

On the tenant side, “We’re doing a mass mailing of posters and information cards, and we’re going to hit the [housing advocacy] organizational conferences,” Santoro said. Other marketing plans include rack cards for all the public libraries, labor offices and local housing authority offices, he noted.

The marketing campaign is key to the site’s success, according to SocialServe.com, the Charlotte, N.C.-based nonprofit that built the site with DECD.

“We’re actually in 20 states now, and we’ve been doing this about eight years,” said Beth Leysieffer, who works in SocialServe.com’s Marketing and Special Projects Department.

While SocialServe.com does not provide regional marketing, the company does create promotional materials for clients – such as DECD – to use to draw attention to the service, she said. The company, founded by a social worker trying to help people find affordable housing, also provides support via a toll-free bilingual call center, because not everyone searching for housing has Internet access, she said.

“We get all kinds of calls,” Leysieffer said. Callers can include people with tight budgets, people trying to escape domestic violence or people who just want to talk to a person, rather than try to search for housing through a computer, she said.

Whether the search is done over the phone or the computer, the SocialServe.com search engine allows potential tenants to look for housing based on a variety of parameters. Shoppers can, for example, look for properties based on the number of bedrooms, school district, distance from a hospital, accessibility for people with disabilities or whether the property allows pets, Leysieffer said.

And, of course, searchers can hunt for affordable housing listings that fall within a certain budget.

Work on the CTHousingSearch.org site began back in mid-April, after DECD had selected SocialServe.com based on its response to a request for proposals that DECD had sent out in December, Santoro said. The SocialServe.com staff has described the project as packing nine months’ worth of work into six weeks, he added.

Early responses from the landlords have generated nearly 50 listings already, he said.

“We’re just waiting to get a critical mass of properties,” Santoro said. “We’ve got really high hopes for this project.”

Recent allocations from the state’s Housing Trust Fund could help expand the Web site’s offerings. The state Bond Commission recently approved $8.7 million for nine projects that will help either create or preserve 477 units of housing.

The funding is earmarked for housing projects in Bridgeport, New Haven, Norwalk and Stamford.

Previous funding of $20 million under the program has helped rehabilitate 342 units and create 360 units of affordable housing. The five-year, $100 million Housing Trust Fund is designed to help create and preserve housing for low- and moderate-income working families through financing in the form of loans and grants.