

How a friend outsourced his apartment hunt (and saved 30 hours) - faulkner8
http://savagethoughts.com/post/810789091/how-i-outsourced-my-apartment-hunt

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zupatol
Unfortunately this is of no help to me. Here in Geneva, Switzerland, the
problem is not choosing the apartment, but being chosen among all the other
people who want the same apartment you do. I've seen people stand in line just
to visit one apartment. I hear there are even worse places than Geneva for
finding an apartment.

Businesses have sprang up to help people find apartments, so it is possible to
outsource your apartment hunt too, but it costs much more than 90$.

~~~
nagrom
This is absolutely true. I am moving to CERN this weekend and found that
securing somewhere to live was extremely stressful, not to mention expensive.

I am actually surprised that, given that housing is a basic human need, there
is no mass-market apartment-finding company that takes all the horrible
awkward work out of finding an apartment and makes it easy and convenient.
I've no idea how you'd do it - maybe build entire neighbourhoods based on
typical lifestyle choice sets and market those individually. Maybe something
like that exists in the US? I've never seen someone successfully do that in
Europe.

~~~
enjo
Why is housing so hard to come by anyways? I'm just curious.. it would seem
like someone would rise to fill that need if people are literally standing in
line to be interviewed for the chance to rent a place.

~~~
mattm
In my city, the average family income is about $60k but housing is expensive
to buy. One-bedroom condo's start at $200k so a lot of people rent.
Unfortunately, since developers can earn so much by selling units instead of
renting them, they all veer towards that.

I'm sure rent control plays a factor too. Rent can only be increased by 3% per
year or something like that.

End result, there hasn't been a new building built for rental apartments in my
city for over 30 years.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Seems like unless there's a constant influx of people, eventually everyone
that wants to buy a condo will end up with one... leaving a lot of built-up
condos ready to sell, with nobody buying. Wonder how long it'll take.

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faulkner8
I sort of watched over his shoulder as he went through this process and it was
quite amazing to observe. The guy he ended up working with, for $3 an hour,
was quite sharp and motivated. When you think of the 30 hours he saved and the
fact that you spend $1000+ on an apartment, the $90 spent is absolutely
nothing.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm wondering where the guy he hired lives, and what the economy is like
there.

~~~
faulkner8
The guy he hired was in a middle eastern country.

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CptMauli
I'm a bit surprised that there seem to be no good apartment search websites.
Has this something to do with the larger home ownership? Or is it an artifact
of the larger area of the US?

In Germany there is for instance <http://www.immobilienscout24.de> and some
more websites like it (although the same offers end up on nearly every one of
them). The search options there are more finely tuned than on lets say
<http://www.apartments.com>. Also the larger newspapers (for instance
<http://immobilienmarkt.sueddeutsche.de/>) have often own search engines for
places to rent or buy.

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pixelbath
Sorry if this sounds trollish, but Shahan was doing "jobs Americans don't want
to do."

Not only is this a good idea online, you can also hire domestic (local)
concierge services to run errands for you during the day. My mother-in-law
successfully runs such a business.

~~~
faulkner8
In addition to individuals who do this, there are also online services that
bids out local concierge services. I know that Chris (the guy who wrote the
linked post) has used TaskRabbit (<http://taskrabbit.com>). I'm going to try
to get him to do a post about that experience as well.

~~~
enjo
Are there any competitors to this? I'd love something like that in Denver.

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tryke
For comedy value, there should be a follow-up article involving the "Casual
Encounters" section of Craigslist.

2600 magazine recently had an article about a Bayesian filter for getting the
spam out of the "w4m" section. A human could weed out rejections, spambots,
and prostitutes, putting the rest into a sortable spreadsheet.

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nandemo
_I wanted a place that has an outdoor space (a yard, a porch, a balcony, or a
deck), hardwood floors, laundry (in unit, in building, or close by), a very
specific location (to balance three commutes), lots of light, and all of the
typical apartment requirements (right size, budget, start date, etc). This was
clearly the job for a human,_

Er, no, this is clearly a job for a real-estate-specific website with a search
form. The part that only a human can do is to actually visit the apartments
but you can't outsource that, at least not to a remote person.

Now, why in the world do people use craigslist by default instead of a better
website? It should be beneficial to tenants -- who will save time and money --
and to landlords and agencies, who will gladly pay a fee to list their
properties.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
As a former landlord, I can answer the latter: because it's free and it was
good enough.

If there was a better free website, I'd use that; but it would have to be
hugely better than Craigslist for me to open my wallet.

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motters
It sounds like a good idea, and something I might try in future apartment
searches because in previous jobs it has always taken quite some time to find
a desirable place to live.

However, there are some niggles at the back of my mind - or perhaps a little
Stallman on my shoulder. Translated into UK pounds $3 per hour would certainly
be below minimum wage. Is it really a good idea to encourage people to lock
themselves into poverty wages? If I can satisfy myself that I'm not actually
creating more poverty then perhaps this strategy is worth trying.

~~~
paulgb
If someone is willing to work for $3 an hour, it's because they can't find
work they'd be willing to do for $4. I'm all for genuine attempts to alleviate
poverty, but the poor should be allowed to decide what is in their best
interest.

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ciupicri
Shouldn't this be the job of a real estate agency? You ask them to find an
apartment matching your criteria and they find it (in their database with the
current offers).

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nihaar
Just thought I'd mention a project I've been working on related to this thread
called MapThatPad (<http://www.mapthatpad.com>) that helps you save apartments
you find and stay organized while you hunt. Helped me quite a bit when I was
looking with my girlfriend.

Having been in the same boat many times, I got tired of spreadsheets and
hacked up this site. Would love any feedback or comments.

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iamdave
I'm actually quite interested to see a discourse on the impacts that these
sort of ultra low-priced outsourced products have had on concierge and virtual
assistant services in small town USA.

Sort of along the same vein of how designers formed an ad hoc association of
how they felt regarding spec-work and design centric crowdsourcing sites like
99designs.

Does anyone have any articles on this?

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ig1
I'd happily pay for this sort of service, but but don't want to deal with the
overhead of having to post on odesk and pick someone suitable (plus the hassle
if they're not very good at it). It would be good if there was a more
specialist online marketplace for this sort of task which reduce those
overheads.

~~~
DenisM
Well, you want a majordomo - someone who will hire and supervise staff. Alas,
the problem is recursive - how do you hire and supervise a majordomo?

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nitrogen
I was very close to trying this for a recent apartment search, but I finally
landed a place just before I crossed the threshold. I spent quite a bit more
than 30 hours cumulatively, though, so I could have saved a lot of time for
more productive tasks.

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jey
Anyone going to systematize this and create a curated list of vetted
apartments for a fee? Maybe something like $9 for a month of access to one
geographic area.

~~~
ericd
I've considered it briefly for PadMapper (<http://www.padmapper.com>). It
would be very expensive to do for all cities, though - the volumes of listings
they would have to look through are pretty enormous if you were doing it
generally. One of the big things you get out of this is that you tell the
person exactly what you want, and they throw away everything else.

There might be some way to make it work, though.

~~~
potatolicious
I used PadMapper to find my new place a few months ago. Thanks again for all
your work on it.

~~~
ericd
You're welcome, if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it.

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PStamatiou
This is what Noah Kagan <okdork.com> did when looking for his SF apartment.

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lsc
the interesting bit here is that the guy didn't seem to /even consider/ a
broker. I wonder why? just too expensive?

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apower
Isn't that what wife is for?

~~~
apower
People here have no sense of humor.

~~~
zackattack
Nah, your comment wasn't funny.

