A few months ago, Zillow.com rolled out a new offering that allowed apartment hunters to search for rental listings on the company's interactive map. Well, it turns out that the Seattle online real estate startup has some new competition in that market, and it comes from a deep-pocketed tech titan on the other side of Lake Washington.

Microsoft this week announced that Bing Maps will start displaying rental listings through a partnership with Oodle.

The company writes in a blog post:

After loading the application, enter a location in the search box and you’ll be zipped over to the respective location with available rentals popped right onto the map. As you navigate the map the search results will dynamically change just as they do with native Bing Maps Search.

There's certainly no shortage of places where consumers can go to find rental listings online, including Rent.com, ApartmentFinder.com, Rentals.com and MyNewPlace. And then, of course, there are sites such as Craigslist.

We've seen Bing move onto the turf of other local niche search startups, most recently in the online recipe arena.

Zillow charges landlords $9.95 to have rental properties appear at the top of search results for 180 days. According to Zillow's Web site, it currently has 64,999 rental properties listed on the site.