Ask HN: Apartment search site that doesn't suck
HN helped me find raveable.com, which quite easily destroys every other hotel search site on the net. Can it do the same for apartment listings?
Searching for "shares" in the East Village yields no results, for example. How hard would it be to harvest craigslist ads? Also, what if I want to do a combined search for shares/studio+s? The neighborhood "Lower East Side" isn't listed. And their "browse" feature is slow and awful.
No, apartment search site needs to function more like a social networking site, so you can preview your roommates' profile, photos, interests/disinterests. And so you can quickly filter by pets, no pets, sex, age range. Everyone asks you to email them a summary anyways. And you need to be able to keep tabs on your applicants/places you are applying to. Not to mention the social proof aspect of having people recommend you.
An NYC apartment site that doesn't suck is next on my to-do list. It's certainly needed. Probably makes more sense as a facebook app.
A Craigslist aggregator with spam/scam/bait_and_switch filtering would be really cool, but that's a different startup.
At least we agree apartment hunting should suck less (especially in NYC). That's what got us started and that's what keeps us going!