To rent an apartment on LoftSmart, a website for college students looking for off-campus housing, users browse listings, take a virtual tour, and read reviews from current or past tenants. If they find a place they like, they can put in an application, sign a lease, and pay their security deposit all online.

That makes the website highly unusual in the online real estate industry, where most listing services direct apartment hunters to get in touch with a broker if they like a listing. It also offers a clue to the way technology is changing the process of finding an apartment for a wider universe of renters. A college student whose first housing transaction takes place entirely online may not be so quick to accept the stressful, time-consuming open houses of traditional renting during their next search.

"This demographic is a really interesting testing ground for the future of real estate," Sam Bernstein, the startup's 23-year-old chief executive officer and co-founder, said. "They're untarnished by cumbersome legacy institutions."

Bernstein started building LoftSmart in 2015 as a sophomore at the University of Virginia, intending to create a Yelp-like product to help his classmates avoid landlords known for shirking basic repairs or withholding security deposits. By the following fall, he had dropped out of college to work on the company full-time. He moved to Austin, Texas, and on his first night in town struck up a random conversation with an engineer named Sundeep Kumar, who would go on to become a co-founder.

Soon the pair realized that the real opportunity wasn't in warning college students away from crummy rental houses but in helping big property managers market their apartments.

Even big campuses are small worlds. In many cases students will be familiar with a given apartment building, either by reputation or because they've already been on site to visit a friend or go to a party. In some markets, Bernstein said, 70 percent of students sign leases for housing without attending an open house or scheduling a viewing. A virtual tour suffices.

Over the past two decades, an industry has sprung up to develop off-campus apartment complexes geared to college students, featuring by-the-bed leases and, often, upscale amenities. Even in its early days, this held obvious appeal for investors. College enrollments were rising, but schools weren't building dorms to keep pace with them, giving the off-campus-dorm developers a captive audience.

Student housing looked even better after the Great Recession, when apartments were leased readily, even as other rental landlords struggled to fill units. The operating theory is that college enrollments tend to rise in a down economy, because it's even harder to get a job with less education and because people don't need to give up as much opportunity to pursue a degree.