Renter. Broker. Property manager. Landlord.

Sunny Kancherla has worn all those hats, and gotten a distinct view of the rental market with each. What the 28-year-old entrepreneur discovered wasn't pretty -- a landscape littered with far-flung information.

"I kept thinking, I can't believe how many places people have to go to just to find a place to live," he said. "I wondered: How can I make it work better?"

His solution is GardenStateApartments.com, a multiple-listings service where users can post and view rental units from throughout New Jersey.

The Web site joins more than a dozen others that list apartments and homes for rent, along with the traditional resources renters turn to -- newspaper classified ads, apartment guides, other tenants and brokers -- when hunting for a home.

Kancherla, whose interest in real estate began when he was 18, launched his Newark company in 2005 and began promoting the online service in July. He said the site now gets more than 2 million hits a day.

Through this month, the public has free access -- and landlords and property owners can post vacancies at no charge.

Beginning in April or May, the company will start offering tiered pricing. Building managers, for example, will have to pay 77 cents per listing per day, while landlords will be charged 71 or 79 cents a day depending on their membership level.

Kancherla hasn't started spending on advertising yet. But based on word of mouth, he said more than 1,000 owners, real estate agents and managers have signed up.

It's true that apartment hunters increasingly are tapping the Internet, said Alan Hammer, senior management adviser at Westminster Management, the apartment division of Kushner Cos.

However, compared with how many Web-based calls result in leases, old-fashioned tenant referrals and building visits still remain the principal routes to an apartment in his experience, he said.

"We're hesitant to give up the traditional sources because we don't want to take too great a risk," he said.

Searching online for rentals has obvious appeal -- even if some listings are outdated or don't include photos.

One day last week, a search for "Hackensack" on GardenStateApartments.com brought up a list of 56 houses and apartments -- only six of them in Hackensack. Results were listed in order of last update, rather than by town.

The same search on Apartments.com resulted in 38 randomly listed rentals. Hackensack total: five.

Rent.com had 17 listings for Hackensack, all clustered at the top of the list. Rent.com requires users to enter an e-mail address, however, and sent two unsolicited e-mails the following day.

Each site offers particular selling points.

Many of the Apartments.com listings include virtual, 360-degree tours of apartments. Rent.com offers a $100 debit card to those who used the site to find an apartment.

In recent months, Kancherla and his small staff began placing a library of resources on his site, including a primer on landlord-tenant law, advice on moving and the advantages of buying renters insurance. They also plan to have a consultant answer real estate questions online.

"What we're doing is creating a vehicle for people to get all the information they need in one place," Kancherla said.

Kancherla argues that some sites, such as the stripped-down craigslist.com, make it harder for users to find the information they seek.

"The difficulty people have with craigslist is that the info isn't well-organized," he said. "Listings slide down as new ones come in. In a matter of hours or days your ad gets lost and you have to repost it so it's seen again."

Kancherla's site is set up so that whoever needs the service more is the one who pays for it.

For example, tenants who can't find what they're looking for in the free public listings can pay to see private postings -- those the landlords did not have to pay for.

In the hot rental market of, say, Hoboken, tenants might be more willing to pay for a lead. In South Jersey, where vacancy rates are higher, property owners would be more likely to pay to advertise vacancies, Kancherla said.

Robert White, 45, signed the lease on a garden apartment in Lodi last week. He searched through the classifieds, knowing the paid ads were likely to be up-to-date.

"I saw something in the newspaper, I called about it, and here I am," he said by phone from Koval Realty in Hackensack. "I've never really looked for a place on the Internet. This just seemed the simplest way to go."

E-mail: crouse@northjersey.com