PadMapper Apartment Search
padmapper.com
padmapper.com
They also made the SF Crime Map Overlay which was covered on HN: http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco-crime...
Unfortunately, the crime map overlay is kind of useless as it's total crime, not per capita, so it makes dense areas look more dangerous than they really are.
It's tough to normalize this kind of thing well, since there's an argument to be made that if there's a shooting on your block, it'll feel dangerous no matter how many people there are living there. Also, primarily commercial districts would get unfairly dinged if it was normalization per capita... would be better with foot traffic in that case.
I agree foot traffic might be a better metric than population, though.
Padmapper is awesome btw.
(and yes, agreed, it's a very useful site)
How is this different/better than the existing http://www.housingmaps.com/ ?
How is this different/better than Hot Pads? http://hotpads.com/
Do you have CraigsList's permission to use their listings? I thought they were against this sort of site and the Housing Maps creator had special permission to do what he did.
Housingmaps is great, and was probably the inspiration for all these sites. The reasons I wrote my own were its limited selection and inflexible filters, which were pretty painful to use in my search.
Hotpads was around, but I didn't like it very much when I started this. I think it used to be more big buildings/complexes, and I don't like the flash-based map (I'm on a mac). It's perfectly usable, though. If you give both a try, I'd love to get your impressions.
One of these sites needs to use Mechanical Turk (or similar) to pay people to walk around and find "for rent" signs on the street, call the number, get the details, and data entry them into the site.
Then have a "did this number work for you?" thing on the site, and you don't get paid until someone successfully calls the landlord and verifies that it's a real rental. Or maybe do a double-check kind of setup where some AT users create listings and other verify them. Some way to handle fraud.
That would be an insanely useful apartment site. That site would become a household name.
The founder behind it is a sharp guy too, here's a good interview with him - http://valleyloop.com/2010/10/11/qa-with-founder-of-padmappe...
I did see a need for a more collaborative/organizational tool when apartment hunting a couple of years ago while looking for apartments with my fiancee. So worked on building http://www.mapthatpad.com.
Would love any feedback from the HN crowd!
EDIT: typo
But yeah, there is more to be done on the organizational and collaborative fronts.
Flagging helps with this somewhat, but that's dependent on high usage, which isn't the case in all areas. There is some automatic stuff that runs to filter obviously wrong things out, but I plan on looking more into that.
It would also be good if PadMapper could scrape addresses from the title of posts (or from within the post) when there is no (full) address link at the bottom of a Craigslist post. This might be a bit more tricky since the way some of the addresses are written can't even be interpreted by Google Maps.
I still found PadMapper to be the best way to find apartments in areas I wanted to live, and it is a lot clearer than HotPads and Google Property search. One thing that I would really love is a more complete map that shows transportation and amenities like Google Maps. I often found myself having to re-search the address on Google Maps to find out what was in the neighbourhood.
My experiences are still fresh in my mind, so feel free to contact me if you want some more feedback.
If there's no map link, it attempts to infer based on that other info you mention and classifies them as likely inaccurate. Frequently it's the map link that's wrong, since people often file it in re wrong sub-CL and CL seems to modify the map link based on that info.
I'd be really interested if there were aspects you liked (or didn't like) about the others you tried.
Thanks!
Has CL shut down people who used their data but played by the rules of not overloading their servers or other API rudeness?
When transitioning to finding furniture on cl, I was really missing the mapping option. "Padmapper" for the other categories?
Keep up the good work.
I think the ideal real estate application is a perfect combination of maps and text/image
The iPhone app ( http://cribq.com/go/appstore ) is by far the most popular part of it.
The website hasn't been updated in a long time, although it still works well. I built the site because housingmaps at the time was not up to date enough, was very incomplete, and didn't allow drill-down into neighborhoods. I also added things like streetview, and the very cool Microsoft bird's eye view. My goal was ultimately to add all kinds of data to help people move, similar to what the YC startup Movity was doing.
According to Craig, he only goes after sites which cause too much load on their servers. I base that on a few comments he has made on Quora. Evidence points more toward him going after heavily commercialized sites, or mixing data with other providers.
Padmapper and similar can do their job with RSS feeds and occasional callbacks to see if ads are still alive, which I think alleviates a majority of load concerns. One area in which Craigslist has moved to shut down Craigslist search engines is where services have implemented multi-location search for sales items, which violates the Craigslist maxim of connecting people locally and introduces shipping and payment complications (Paypal) that they'd rather not be in the middle of. That Padmapper deals with a part of Craigslist that is necessarily localized may be their saving grace.
Users just want a better home shopping experience, with just a little trustable advice sprinkled on top. It makes sense now, but I was stuck in "cool product land." I wonder if Movity found the same thing in their customer development.
I've always wanted to use Craigslist data on my local real estate site but I know it's 100% against their TOS and I didn't want to give them any more headaches than they currently have.
It's great to see that people are able to do it but it just makes the whole situation more inscrutable. So I guess it's okay if you don't get caught or have good intentions. Well, I guess that's better than nothing.