Ask HN: What do you use when searching for houses or apartments online? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use when searching for houses or apartments online?

23 pointsjmtame39 comments

Craigslist? Any other popular ones if you're looking for cheap housing online?

I use PadMapper.

http://www.padmapper.com

Hadn't seen that before. Nice find.

Hey, thanks for the plug. If anyone has any questions or suggestions, please feel free to email me at padmapper@gmail.com (or use the feedback link on the site). It's still pretty new, and there's definitely room for improvement.

Great job! We'll be using padmapper on our house hunt from now on.

How do you handle CL entries without street location information?

Unfortunately, PadMapper has to ignore those - there's nothing that can really be done. This means that about 1/2-2/3 of listings end up getting ignored. The ones that are left are less likely to be a waste of your time, though.

Great site. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement or whether it would hurt the performance, but it would be great if you overlaid the subway lines. See http://www.onnyturf.com/subway/ for an example.

Frankly, I don't know why google hasn't done this themselves, it's incredibly useful.

Good idea - it would slow it down a bit, but I'm pretty sure it would be useful. The subway commute-time filter is a bit limited in its use, but you can use it to try areas for their commute time to other areas.

Also, it's not as useful, but if you zoom in on the metro stations on any google map, it'll tell you what lines stop there.

Great site :) I've seen people do Google Maps-integrated housing searches, but they always insist on using their own (very limited) data. It's about time someone did this with CL :)

I'm currently looking for housing too, so thanks a ton :)

Amazing site. I'm moving to Montreal and have been sorting through TONS of listings (not used to it all, coming from a much smaller city!) and it's been pretty tiresome

This site is seriously a godsend and will instantly reduce our stress in finding a place.

It's a lovely UI, but golly is it slow.

Thanks!

What browser are you using? It basically doesn't support IE 6/7 because their anemic Javascript engines make it torturously slow. I'm very curious to hear about your experience, though... padmapper@gmail.com

It's pretty fast on the Safari beta... that being said, it is pretty slow if you try to zoom into the map via mousewheel, since it does an update even at high zoom levels. Maybe limit updates to every X zoom levels at the high level, and then update at every zoom for the finer ones.

Ah yeah, that might be an optimization worth making. Thanks for the feedback.

Ability to link to the current view would be nice... I wanted to show a friend a neighbourhood I was looking at but couldn't :) Sorry to suggesting such low-priority things, I'm a bit OCD about these things...

That's actually something I've been wanting to do for a while, I just haven't gotten around to it - basically a full "save state".

A workaround is to save something in the neighborhood to your favorites list, and then save the favorites list. This'll shoot you an email with a link that can restore that list, and you can send/forward that link to your friend. Once the list is loaded up, they can click on the go to marker button/graphic in the saved favorites list.

On a simpler scale, can't you do this the Google Maps way? Which is to say, specify a center lat/long and a zoom level. This way you're not bookmarking any data specifically, but bookmarking your view instead.

Depends on use case: the case I was in was just that I wanted to show a friend what was available in a particular neighbourhood, as opposed to a specific set of postings.

Yeah, that's basically what I want to do - save the view as well as the filters that have been applied.

Great site. Love the way you've maximized the amount of apartments and minimized the size of the controls. Good job!

I work at (and and found my current apartment using) HotPads - http://hotpads.com We list about 300k rental houses and apartments all over the US

I wrote a map mash-up of CraigsList ads recently: http://www.trailbehind.com/housing_map

If you are looking for short term housing Air Bed & Breakfast works pretty well. (www.airbnb.com) It is also a YCombinator company.

If I was looking now, I'd only use Craigslist

Last time I tried looking using Craigslist (this was in Bloomington, IN in 2006) there was about a 1:1 spam/ham ratio. I gave up in disgust pretty quickly.

If you're looking for student rental housing by any chance, that's what our startup is for... http://www.ratemystudentrental.com

For non-student housing, I use http://www.mapskrieg.com

Using my own search organization tool called FlowThing:

http://i44.tinypic.com/erei4g.jpg

Email me for an invite code... in a very private alpha right now.

Ubiquity + Craigslist Check the video at: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

streeteasy.com in NYC

+1 ... Ok fine I work there, but I use it too!

Wow this is the best one I've seen for NYC by far

housingmaps.com

I like redfin.com, estately.com, and realtor.com. Then use dwellicious.com to bookmark and track listings from different sites in one place.

http://www.booli.se in Sweden. Pretty good UI.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk

euwyn.com ? (via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544074 )

Ubiquity + Craigslist Check the video at: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

www.realestate.com.au - they have some annoying problems but they are the dominant force with the most listings.

globrix.com in UK

I prefer gumtree.com

For me its findaproperty.com for UK (esp London), but as someone previously posted, rightmove.co.uk is pretty good as well

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