
PadMapper Apartment Search - shawndumas
http://www.padmapper.com/
======
kalvin
I've talked to at least a dozen people who moved into SF in the last 16 months
and every one of them used Padmapper, including me. It's great. If Craigslist
ever made acquisitions... or added features... this would/should be at the top
of the list.

They also made the SF Crime Map Overlay which was covered on HN:
[http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco-
crime...](http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco-crime-
mapoverlay/)

~~~
DavidSJ
Agree with everything you said. I also moved to SF recently and used
PadMapper. There's no reason to use anything else.

Unfortunately, the crime map overlay is kind of useless as it's total crime,
not per capita, so it makes dense areas look more dangerous than they really
are.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, I'm going to try redoing the overlay with homicides and other violent
crimes pretty soon.

It's tough to normalize this kind of thing well, since there's an argument to
be made that if there's a shooting on your block, it'll feel dangerous no
matter how many people there are living there. Also, primarily commercial
districts would get unfairly dinged if it was normalization per capita...
would be better with foot traffic in that case.

~~~
DavidSJ
A shooting is bad enough that it should show up regardless of the population
density. But I certainly would feel a lot less safe if a shooting took place
on a street where only 10 people lived, so density is still a valid factor.

I agree foot traffic might be a better metric than population, though.

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acgourley
Can anyone give a synopsis on why CL hasn't shut them down like they
traditionally do with every site that repackages their data? I must be missing
a nuance.

(and yes, agreed, it's a very useful site)

~~~
ericd
My theory (I wrote PadMapper) is that as long as it's light on their servers,
helpful to their users, doesn't bombard them with ads, and sends users back to
them, they're fine with it. PadMapper's just a search engine for part of their
stuff.

~~~
russianbandit
Any plans on moving to the newer Google Maps?

~~~
ericd
Maybe. There are some features missing in the new API that PadMapper uses
(tabbed info windows, for example), the benefit isn't completely clear, and
it's likely to be a pretty large amount of work, so it's not a very high
priority. Any reason you'd want it to be converted?

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dabent
At first glance it looks pretty cool, but I have a few questions.

How is this different/better than the existing <http://www.housingmaps.com/> ?

How is this different/better than Hot Pads? <http://hotpads.com/>

Do you have CraigsList's permission to use their listings? I thought they were
against this sort of site and the Housing Maps creator had special permission
to do what he did.

~~~
ericd
A lot of the advantages are pretty subjective, and I'm biased (I didn't post
this, by the way, I just learned about it via twitter).

Housingmaps is great, and was probably the inspiration for all these sites.
The reasons I wrote my own were its limited selection and inflexible filters,
which were pretty painful to use in my search.

Hotpads was around, but I didn't like it very much when I started this. I
think it used to be more big buildings/complexes, and I don't like the flash-
based map (I'm on a mac). It's perfectly usable, though. If you give both a
try, I'd love to get your impressions.

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erikpukinskis
This kind of things is cool, except the vast majority of apartments are not
listed on Craigslist or Google or anywhere online.

One of these sites needs to use Mechanical Turk (or similar) to pay people to
walk around and find "for rent" signs on the street, call the number, get the
details, and data entry them into the site.

Then have a "did this number work for you?" thing on the site, and you don't
get paid until someone successfully calls the landlord and verifies that it's
a real rental. Or maybe do a double-check kind of setup where some AT users
create listings and other verify them. Some way to handle fraud.

 _That_ would be an insanely useful apartment site. That site would become a
household name.

~~~
reneherse
My hunch is that in the Bay Area, most apartments are in fact on Craigslist.
The exception that I'm aware of are apartments rented by primarily non-English
speakers, such as places in SF Chinatown and other highly ethnic
neighborhoods. There you might find listings in a local Chinese-language
newspaper or on a bulletin board at a small store.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I've never lived in the Bay, so I can't say. But I've recently done apartment
searches in San Diego and Phoenix, and by far the strategy of most landlords
is just to put up a "For Rent" sign with a phone number outside.

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sayemm
Padmapper's a great utility for finding apartments. I used it before while
looking for sublets in NYC. The site has a great UI and adds a ton of value -
it's there just when you need it, it's like your Dropbox for apartment-
hunting.

The founder behind it is a sharp guy too, here's a good interview with him -
[http://valleyloop.com/2010/10/11/qa-with-founder-of-
padmappe...](http://valleyloop.com/2010/10/11/qa-with-founder-of-padmapper-
com/)

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nihaar
I've used the site in the past and its certainly better than most real estate
search engines that seem to be stuck in the 90s.

I did see a need for a more collaborative/organizational tool when apartment
hunting a couple of years ago while looking for apartments with my fiancee. So
worked on building <http://www.mapthatpad.com>.

Would love any feedback from the HN crowd!

EDIT: typo

~~~
ericd
Nice name ;-)

But yeah, there is more to be done on the organizational and collaborative
fronts.

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paulsb
PadMapper is a very useful tool. I used it when I moved to NY. It filters
results well, but the only problem I had was that it didn't always have the
correct location. I assume it scrapes the link to the Google Map from
Craigslist, so the inaccuracy might be from the advertiser who doesn't put in
the correct geo-location.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, there are some issues with this, usually because the address is
ambiguous or downright wrong. People throwing up stuff on CList aren't always
very careful about their data entry, unfortunately.

Flagging helps with this somewhat, but that's dependent on high usage, which
isn't the case in all areas. There is some automatic stuff that runs to filter
obviously wrong things out, but I plan on looking more into that.

~~~
paulsb
That's good to know. I thought I had found some real bargains in Manhattan but
then realized the apartments were not in Manhattan, e.g. the address on
Craigslist would simply be '34th St.' and PadMapper would plot it in
Manhattan, but it is was actually 34th St. in Astoria.

It would also be good if PadMapper could scrape addresses from the title of
posts (or from within the post) when there is no (full) address link at the
bottom of a Craigslist post. This might be a bit more tricky since the way
some of the addresses are written can't even be interpreted by Google Maps.

I still found PadMapper to be the best way to find apartments in areas I
wanted to live, and it is a lot clearer than HotPads and Google Property
search. One thing that I would really love is a more complete map that shows
transportation and amenities like Google Maps. I often found myself having to
re-search the address on Google Maps to find out what was in the
neighbourhood.

My experiences are still fresh in my mind, so feel free to contact me if you
want some more feedback.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, that'd be great if you could share (padmapper at gmail). I started
recreating the google transit overlay, but it's pretty nontrivial to make a
readable subway map programmatically and I got sidetracked on other projects.

If there's no map link, it attempts to infer based on that other info you
mention and classifies them as likely inaccurate. Frequently it's the map link
that's wrong, since people often file it in re wrong sub-CL and CL seems to
modify the map link based on that info.

I'd be really interested if there were aspects you liked (or didn't like)
about the others you tried.

Thanks!

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MattGrommes
I agree with the other commenters, I love PadMapper. Helped me find a great
place when I moved to San Diego.

Has CL shut down people who used their data but played by the rules of not
overloading their servers or other API rudeness?

~~~
ericd
They shut down Oodle a while back, but who knows if they were playing nice.
Seems like Oodle was also hijacking the listings and putting them on their own
site, which I'd imagine is one of the things they don't like.

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pkulak
Oh wow, this is fantastic! I'm moving soon and this is exactly what I need.
Scanning down Craigslist text adds is just terrible. This is downright fun.
Thanks so much for creating this!

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cvg
I love padmapper. Best of the craigslist mapping sites.

When transitioning to finding furniture on cl, I was really missing the
mapping option. "Padmapper" for the other categories?

~~~
ericd
Heh maybe eventually as a follow-on service. The format doesn't make quite as
much sense for most categories, but for a few limited ones, it does.

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jarek
Any chance at all of combining data from this and Mapnificent? I notice this
has a commute time option, but it's walk or drive only.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, I've been meaning to, actually.

~~~
jarek
Hooray! Thank you.

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thomasfl
The palette-like user interface is really cool, but you're using the old
Google Maps API.

Keep up the good work.

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m0shen
I used this to find my current apartment. It made the pain of the apartment
hunt bearable.

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elvirs
why all real estate applications are pure text/image or pure maps with some
text pop-ups?

I think the ideal real estate application is a perfect combination of maps and
text/image

~~~
ericd
Actually, there are very few pure maps sites - most are hybrid maps/list
sites. I don't really see the point, though - the location is what matters
most, and you always have the other filters to weed out the stuff you wouldn't
want to look at anyway.

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nmaio
Ummm, this rocks. Simple as that. So great.

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aneth
I built a similar site (which I think pre-dates PadMapper): <http://cribq.com>

The iPhone app ( <http://cribq.com/go/appstore> ) is by far the most popular
part of it.

The website hasn't been updated in a long time, although it still works well.
I built the site because housingmaps at the time was not up to date enough,
was very incomplete, and didn't allow drill-down into neighborhoods. I also
added things like streetview, and the very cool Microsoft bird's eye view. My
goal was ultimately to add all kinds of data to help people move, similar to
what the YC startup Movity was doing.

According to Craig, he only goes after sites which cause too much load on
their servers. I base that on a few comments he has made on Quora. Evidence
points more toward him going after heavily commercialized sites, or mixing
data with other providers.

~~~
rhizome
My impression is that furthermore, most of the problem sites are those who are
trying to _post_ ads. There are a million spammers and lazy businesses out
there who would simply LOVE to be able to use Craigslist as their own personal
ad bucket. Craig even calls them out specifically in the TOU as "third-party
posting services."

Padmapper and similar can do their job with RSS feeds and occasional callbacks
to see if ads are still alive, which I think alleviates a majority of load
concerns. One area in which Craigslist has moved to shut down Craigslist
search engines is where services have implemented multi-location search for
sales items, which violates the Craigslist maxim of connecting people locally
and introduces shipping and payment complications (Paypal) that they'd rather
not be in the middle of. That Padmapper deals with a part of Craigslist that
is necessarily localized may be their saving grace.

~~~
slouch
Some categories would love for CL to legitimize the third party services by
charging and accepting bulk feeds (like CL does for real estate). Until the
demand is served, third parties will innovate externally.

