
Do you pay the right rent? Compare all rents, all over Europe - pirhoo
http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/quiz/
======
xfour
Slide deck style buildup has me wanting to scream. Then I found out it was
Europe only. Can't use a co.uk or denote in some way?

~~~
AdamGibbins
Welcome to the perspective of Europeans on a regular basis ;)

Do agree the slide show is annoying and entirely redundant.

There's a list of supported cities here:
[http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/city/](http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/city/)

~~~
leejo
If you do a binary search on their API you discover they have 138 cities,
somewhat more than listed in the drop down:
[http://api.rentswatch.com/](http://api.rentswatch.com/)

They're claiming to have the largest database of rent prices in Europe, is
this true?

~~~
kakwa_
According to their map, for my neighborhood (XIVe in Paris), they've analyzed
339 flats which is not a lot to be true...

I've collected about the same number just using one website API for around one
month while I was searching a few years ago:

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kakwa/supybot-plugin-
selog...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kakwa/supybot-plugin-
seloger/master/stats/75014)

And their statistics are far too simple. For example there are huge
differences between very small flats (~15m^2) and flats above ~50m^2, the
price per square meter is 50% higher for the small ones.

A global average like presented is nearly meaningless.

------
cableshaft
That was weird. It acted as if everything was ridiculously high with its text,
even though my rent is 5% higher than average in "Europe" (and I'm in the US).
5% doesn't seem like a whole lot, but it was like "Ouch! See we told you you
didn't want to know how high it was!".... yeah, I don't really care.

~~~
beambot
You care so little that you felt compelled to comment on HackerNews about how
little you cared? I find this level of vitriol (spite?) toward someone else's
free service fascinating... as if no one else, ever, might find it valuable?

~~~
adrusi
What a narrow way to look at things. First of all, it seems that cableshaft
felt talked down to. In that case it doesn't matter that it's a "free
service", in-person conversations are also "free" but it's reasonable to raise
a complaint if the other party is condescending.

But I interpret their comment as more directed toward HN users than the
creator of this site. That they felt cheated, seeing this link on the HN front
page only to discover that it's lame and rude. I think it's perfectly fine to
express that discontent in the comments, especially since HN doesn't allow
downvoting stories.

~~~
beambot
Hacker News does allow downvoting of stories -- in the form of flagging once
you've surpassed the karma threshold.

Leaving comments along the lines of "I tried it and it sucked because it
doesn't support the US" is not, in my opinion, in line with the hacker news
civility guidelines -- it's not constructive, especially when "all over
Europe" is explicitly mentioned in the post's title. As for site portraying
rent prices as "high"... it's all relative; those prices may be high for
people in Europe, even though they might be paltry compared to SFBA.

~~~
cableshaft
It had nothing to do with not supporting the US. Me being from the US is
fairly irrelevant, I wasn't expecting accurate data, just curious what the
equivalent in Europe would be.

What I didn't like was that it assumed that 5% higher than average was like
some crazy high percentage and I'm getting totally fleeced and "Ooh snap! We
warned you! You totally shouldn't have clicked this link! (except we baited
you into it)"

It's the attitude the website presented, not the actual data. And it's
constructive in so much as I don't want people to use this site as a guideline
on how to communicate with its audience when they make their own websites.

5% of my rent is roughly $50 a month, btw. Not insignificant, but not enough
to warrant its tone either. And I don't live in the Bay Area, thanks for
making another assumption about me.

------
enraged_camel
Doesn't work in Chrome.

>>XMLHttpRequest cannot load
[http://api.rentswatch.com/api/cities/all](http://api.rentswatch.com/api/cities/all).
No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.
Origin '[http://www.rentswatch.com'](http://www.rentswatch.com') is therefore
not allowed access.

~~~
pirhoo
Hm weird, the API allows CORS [https://github.com/jplusplus/rentswatch-
api/blob/master/serv...](https://github.com/jplusplus/rentswatch-
api/blob/master/server/config/express.js#L36)

------
acomjean
I liked the heat maps of the rent in various cities, it More interesting to
me.[1] Wish they had not just europe, but then you have currencies to
translate etc..

[1} [http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/city/](http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/city/)

~~~
Symbiote
I found a problem with the data, at least in Copenhagen.

The squares in the centre of the city have about 5-40 data points in each one,
except for the very middle square, which has over 3000. That square has the
central post office, and therefore postcode 1000. Perhaps where all the
"unknown, Copenhagen" data was allocated.

------
t_fatus
Bit of a burden to get to the actual answer, but brilliant way to get data /
display results.

Not very accurate in Paris though, my rent is actually a good deal in my
neighbourhood, and it states it's overpriced. But 2km radius in paris could
lead to a x3 in price for the same surface ;)

~~~
collyw
Exactly. In Barcelona the prices seem to correlate a lot with the distance to
a metro station. Plus I have a patio in my flat. Should I include that in the
size or not?

------
danpalmer
Yeah, this pretty much lost me at the point that it asked for the size of the
flat. a) very few flats in my area list a size in m^2 b) there are other
factors that mean far more to me, or to other people looking for flats in my
price range in London.

~~~
TillE
> very few flats in my area list a size in m^2

That's really weird. It's one of the very few objective aspects to measure
when comparing properties.

~~~
justinclift
Hmmm, both Australia and UK seem to mostly list properties by # of
bedrooms/facilities (eg 3 bedroom, 2 bathrooms, outside shed) kind of thing. I
don't recall them listing the size in m^2 very often, or at all.

------
ladon86
Our rent in San Francisco was higher than the maximum allowed on the form
(€3000) :(

To be clear, the amount I actually pay is lower because I have roommates.

~~~
chrisseaton
When Americans say they have roommates in SF do you mean you have to literally
share the same room as someone you aren't in a relationship with?

~~~
baseonmars
In my experience it just mean they're sharing the property, not living in the
same room.

~~~
chrisseaton
Ah. We say housemates to mean that, and roommates to mean if you are actually
sharing a room (which wouldn't be likely).

~~~
taurath
Yeah - people don't tend to say "house" when they mean "apartment" here, so a
housemate would imply that you are living in a house.

------
xiphias
I'm in Europe and it's unusable for me as well...it all depends on a lot of
factors, it's easy to get cheap flat if you are OK to live far from the city
center of a city with good job opportunities

------
planetjones
It seems to disable form input if you enter a CHF rent in the four figures.
Not many people are paying less than 1000 CHF here. Also the interface -
having to click through the 'wizard' is absolutely awful IMO. Am I sure I want
to know!? Actually I'm not. Because I have no faith the answer will be
sensible.

------
taurath
I love the dataset, but square meter/dollar is VERY difficult for me to
correlate quickly as it takes a few calculations that are difficult to do in
my head to compare apartment sizes.

What if you could see prices by particular sets of square meters? If I have a
300sq meter apartment, I'd want to see prices by the same size.

------
lumberjack
For me it was right on the money so good job I guess.

I do however think that the next big update should include some measure of the
"location in the city". I chose my flat because of the prime location and not
because of how big it is.

------
DanBC
England has something called Local Housing Allowance.

This sets the maximum rate that a local authority will pay as Housing Benefit
for various types of property.

I have no idea if there's a central list of all the LHAs across England, or if
you'd have to scrape all those sites yourself. But it would be useful
information to have.

Here's the rates for Cheltenham:
[http://www.cheltenham.gov.uk/info/200008/benefits/565/local_...](http://www.cheltenham.gov.uk/info/200008/benefits/565/local_housing_allowance_rates)

------
corobo
Pro tip you can spam click and it'll stop when you get to the point where you
enter your rent. Holy damn the way this is presented is annoying!

You're not missing anything by skipping the fluff.

------
VonGallifrey
Looks nice, but why does the "When did you move in?" at the end only go back
to 2012?

I moved in to my apartment back in 2011 and can not complete the form.

------
btbuildem
That click-through text thing is ineffective. Would be useful to state clearly
this is a geographically-limited service.

------
daveloyall
There are some rentwatch-* repos here:
[https://github.com/jplusplus/](https://github.com/jplusplus/)

~~~
daveloyall
Apparently they gathered the data by scraping.
[http://blog.rentswatch.com/writing-
scrapers/](http://blog.rentswatch.com/writing-scrapers/)

The scraper is here: [https://github.com/jplusplus/rentswatch-
scraper](https://github.com/jplusplus/rentswatch-scraper)

Hm, they don't seem to include a specific implementation for Craigslist,
though they mention it as a datasource on their blog. Maybe email them for a
copy of that.

In Omaha, Nebraska, at least, Craigslist isn't the final word on rent prices.
You'll find disproportionate representation of certain classes of
apartment/house. The cheapest and the most expensive housing won't be found on
CL.

~~~
patrickk
Craigslist is barely used in Europe, certainly in Germany.

------
facepalm
Not clear whether to include running costs in the rent (heating, garbage
disposal...)?

------
EvgeniyZh
Nice way to collect the data.

