"What Viva does is it gives us a tremendous source of qualified rental leads," says Doug Crocker, CEO at Equity Residential. "A lot of Internet traffic is just information surfing and it's hard to know which leads are qualified." The reason Viva can supply such high quality leads to apartment owners, according to Viva CEO and co-founder Scott Ingraham, is that its system allows the prospective renter to put his/her requirements out for bid. "You know when someone is willing to go through this process that they have a degree of seriousness about doing a transaction," says Crocker.

Ingraham says that his competitors, which include Apartments.com and Springstreet.com, don't provide the same degree of interactivity that Viva does with prospective tenants. Because up to 40% of all prospective tenants are expected to use the Internet to search for apartments by 2003, Crocker says that the digital dialog Viva fosters with potential tenants will be extremely valuable. He says it was Viva's ability to nurture this dialog that was a key reason the seven REITs chose Viva.

Equity Residential and the other REIT partners have been given an incentive to use the Viva system to do rental transactions. Monday's deal with Viva includes equity warrants that will be issued based on a given REIT's transaction volume contribution to the Viva network, according to Crocker.