

Ask HN: Apartment search site that doesn't suck - DanielStraight

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?
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pg
Are you in the NYC area? <http://renthop.com>

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zackattack
I'm sorry, but I think renthop sucks. I know this because I am taking a job in
NYC and spent the past week crashing on ferric's couch, conducting an
apartment search full-time. And renthop was useless to me.

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.

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leelin
It sounds like you are looking for a roommates / shares site, not an apartment
search site.

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!

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Berzout
Craigslist actively codes against aggregators I believe.

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mildweed
<http://populet.com> is in beta right now. Soon it will be an amazing
apartment search site (not to mention great tool for landlords).

