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College Marketplace is the student-only buy and sell app for Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. Every account is verified with an @eiu.edu email address, so you're only ever trading with other Panthers — not strangers from Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.

EIU requires students to live in University residence halls for their first two years after high school graduation, so most of campus is buying and selling within a few blocks of one another. The larger halls carry a lot of that traffic: Andrews Hall, Lawson Hall, and Taylor Hall each run several hundred residents deep, with living-learning communities folded in. Lincoln Hall is all-female and Powell-Norton Hall is all-male, while Ford Hall, McKinney Hall, and Weller Hall make up the Triad, three smaller communities near the center of campus. Pemberton Hall, opened in 1909 and the oldest women's residence hall in Illinois, keeps a community all its own. Once students clear 30 credit hours they can move into suite-style Stevenson Hall, and at 48 hours the apartments at University Court open up. Everything you need is already on campus. Eastern Illinois students post mini fridges, futons, storage bins, desk lamps, monitors, bikes, and gently used textbooks every semester — usually for a fraction of retail.

Rooms come furnished, and the housing rules shape what's worth buying secondhand. Beds are Twin XL, so hand-me-down sheets from a standard twin won't fit. Nearly every hall is air conditioned, several with in-room controls, though Pemberton's A/C is limited to the lobby and TV room, which makes fans move fast there. Most halls have stackable furniture — Pemberton and Stevenson are the exceptions — and the university supplies no loft kits or risers, so student-built lofts and bunks have to be free-standing, unattached to walls or ceilings, and never enclosed. Refrigerators cannot exceed 5 cubic feet, microwaves are capped at 900 watts and must have been built within the past five years, and MicroFridge units can be rented through the front desk if you'd rather not buy.

When it's time to hand something off, meet somewhere busy and public. The Martin Luther King Jr. University Union and the University Food Court inside it are the obvious choice, and Booth Library, the Student Recreation Center, and the South Quad Dining Center all work just as well between classes. No shipping labels, no delivery fees, no meeting someone off campus.

Popular categories at Eastern Illinois: textbooks and course materials · dorm and apartment furniture · mini fridges and microwaves · bikes and scooters · EIU apparel and game day gear · electronics and monitors · event tickets · lofting kits and bed risers · storage bins and organizers