

RentHop (YC S09) Launches Algorithmic Apartment Search In Boston - lzhou
http://www.thrillist.com/money/boston/renthop_real-estate_services_websites_tech-services

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tibbon
Seems, not quite there yet. I like living in Somerville, which is one of the
neighborhoods it indexes.

1) It only returns 19 results for Somerville

2) None of them allow cats (really? Every apartment I've lived in Somerville
was more than happy to have cats).

3) There is no option to search for ones with garages (yes, there are garages
in Somerville!)

4) There is no feedback as to where this Hop Score comes from (freshness,
quality, manager? How do they know who a good landlord is?)

I'm not sure what this does for me honestly over other services. It looks
nice. But 3 years, MIT developers and funding don't seem to add up here.

Fundamentally, the problem of indexing information about apartments is still
broken completely, and no one seems to be able to fix it.

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leelin
Hi there, I'm one of the RentHop founders.

For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data
partners and our NYC models. We'll be sure our scoring gets smarter and better
fit to Boston over time.

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tibbon
Why not just link directly to the site itself, instead of some 3rd party site?
<http://boston.renthop.com/>

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benologist
Thrillist looks like they've taken the garbage tactics of AOL and somehow
managed to make them even more shit - the website the whole article about is
linked only through a redirect-with-our-frame-at-the-top script at the bottom
of it.

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nihaar
Congrats! Having worked with the founders, I can attest to them being "data
geeks". I am a big fan of RentHop NYC and also cant wait till they expand to
other markets like SF =)

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MaxGabriel
Have you considered varying the annotations on your map to help differentiate
apartments? Hipmunk did a blog post explaining their approach to this, I think
it helps you to read data from the map and makes it more visually interesting.
[http://blog.hipmunk.com/1/post/2012/01/the-making-of-
hotel-s...](http://blog.hipmunk.com/1/post/2012/01/the-making-of-hotel-search-
on-mobile.html)

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chrisballinger
Is this just a ripoff of PadMapper (<http://www.padmapper.com>)?

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ericd
So, I wrote/write PadMapper, and I'd say not really. Thanks for looking out
for me, though :-)

The map UI is clearly inspired by it, but the data sources are very different.
If I understand correctly, RentHop mostly focuses on getting information
directly from and making money from rental brokers, whereas PadMapper just
tries to index everything it can (PadMapper takes direct listings from a lot
of the top agents/agencies in NYC/Boston as well, but lots from Craigslist and
other places)

As a result, there are data quality differences (RH's is probably cleaner in
some ways if it is mostly direct), but also as a result RH necessarily has
less selection and a larger percentage of RH's listings probably come with
broker fees. Ultimately, which setup you prefer is down to whether you'd
prefer to work with a broker, I think.

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jquery
How do you index from craigslist? They are notorious for sending "cease and
desist" orders to companies who try to index them. Do you have some special
agreement with them or is a matter of being a small enough fish they haven't
noticed you yet?

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binarysolo
Probably via RSS feeds, not through scraping.

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mayava
Can't wait for this to come to the Bay Area. SF apartment hunting is a
nightmare!

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linuxlewis
You should try livelovely.com for the bay area. It's helped me a lot.

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dkmoon81
In the end - don't we need to see on the effectiveness of the system as time
progresses? That seems to be one of RentHops big wins -> clean data develops
allows for better algorithmic learning?

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o0oooooo
finally,!!! Boston.

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oliverjay1017
perfect timing...was just looking for a new apartment after my landlord raised
rates again...

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benologist
Perfect timing would be yours and the parent account's registration times.

