8 ms·

I'm in the middle of an apartment search. I was reflecting the other day on how much searching for an apartment has changed over the last 10 years. Conclusion:

I'm in the middle of an apartment search. I was reflecting the other day on how much searching for an apartment has changed over the last 10 years. Conclusion: it hasn't changed much at all. It's still necessary to search on a myriad of sites. Most of the time, by the time you inquire, a place is gone. Or the ad was misleading and that "$2000 2BR" is actually "$2000 for the cheapest Studio we have, but we also have 2BR for $3.5K". Finding places that match my criteria still requires careful inspection of the description. Checking a filter box for "Parking" excludes places that only mention parking in the description. With all of the modernization and streamlining that has happened in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful. Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile, but these days, it seems like most listings are posted by scammy middlemen just trying to make a commission on the listing, and now the site actively makes the process even harder. Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever? It seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better option, but what would it take to actually solve this? --- With all of that said, this post is exactly what I needed right now. I've been toying with a very similar idea to improve the efficiency of my search process and this is good inspiration.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Etheryte 5y ago
As someone who just jumped through all the hoops to find a new apartment, the pain is real. I think the main issue is that the incentives are misaligned from the perspective of the seeker. Where I'm currently at (the Netherlands), the market is dominated by agents. Using an agent makes sense from the perspective of the apartment owner — they will take care of managing the ads, initial screening, arranging viewings etc. Given how many people contact a single viewing, you definitely don't want them hitting your personal inbox or phone. From the agent's perspective, it's good to drive people to their company's website rather than one of the big aggregate ones. Having more people visit it means they're more likely to do business with that company specifically. Getting people to visit your company's site is pretty straightforward: they put up ads there earlier, often so much earlier that by the time you see an ad on an aggregate site, it's already fully booked for viewings. And that's how we end up with dozens of different company sites, each crappy in their own way, and in the middle of it all, people trying to find a home pulling their hair out, refreshing a bunch of different websites every few hours.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 5y ago
  The question, though, is: why doesn't this converge to a single monopolist agency, like in the rest of capitalism?
  - scythe 5y ago
    Guess who spends the most money on lobbying? https://www.statista.com/statistics/257344/top-lobbying-spenders-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/257344/top-lobbying-spen...
    - wintermutestwin 5y ago
      Love the dark pattern on that site's cookie popup. How annoying!
  - colinhb 5y ago
    In my experience in NL makelaars (brokers) serve particular niches, and I expect they can outcompete larger firms that don’t understand the neighborhood or municipal market as well, the market segment (roughly price), the kind of buyer/renter, the kind of seller/leaser, not to mention just their access to “deal flow” in their networks unrelated to their expertise. Think it’s all related apartments and houses not really being fungible. ESIT: Also, more directly to GP’s experience, when I was in the market in NL I found the biggest aggregator to be very useful, which is apparently different from their experience: funda.nl
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Because it's a mostly unregulated market. A new competitor has minimal government regulations to satisfy in order to start and everyone and their dog can start doing this job (and believe me, I've met some interesting agents when looking for the best deals both looking for rent and renting out my property). The big centralised agencies don't really have a way to stop smaller agents offering cheaper services and serving different markets (even if they're just different neighbourhoods) is hard. This is how capitalism works when there is no government helping monopolies to form in the name of security / justice / anti-money laundering / insert-politician-buzzword-of-the-day.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
In San Francisco, when I was looking for an apartment,, I always ended up with an apartment with the worst pictures / missing things in the description on Craigslist, because they had less interest / were cheaper. The market for rentals is never efficient and will never be! People who post to Zillow with a perfect description know they can extract more money for it.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I bought my house in the late-ish 90s before the web was really a big thing and certainly before things like Google StreetView. I spent a lot of time driving around to see places where I ended up not even stopping the car once I got there. Today, there would be a lot more information available. However, as you suggest, I assume all that available information probably increases the efficiency of connecting a property with potential buyers/renters so you're less likely to luck into something that others just haven't found yet. (The funny thing is that the house I ended up buying turned out be being sold by someone I knew quite well at work.)
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    We almost didn’t stop into the house we now live in. It was #10 of 10 of open houses on a rainy Saturday and we were just looking to get a sense of things we both liked/didn’t like. This listing had terrible photos and the building had almost no updates since 1993. We walked in and in 2 minutes knew we’d want to buy the place, in part because it showed so poorly and the sellers were motivated to close. Zillow was a thing, but nowhere near as big a force as it is now.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      When I saw the house I eventually bought, I had seen one property I was interested in but was on the fence about. When I saw this one I was pretty much sold. Great property. The house was old and very little had obviously been done with it for decades. And there were some things (like on the small side and one bathroom) that would probably have been showstoppers for a lot of people but weren't an issue for me. Various things cost me a fair bit of money, effort, and angst that I'm glad I didn't know about at the time. But, at the end of the day, I got a ridiculously good deal--especially by today's standards--for a semi-rural place only about an hour out of Boston.
distrill 5y ago
i don't share this experience at all. i've used zillow and apartments.com recently (found a place through apartments.com about a year ago and just found one through zillow a few weeks ago) and had no issues. the filter options work how you'd expect, and i wasn't put in touch with any middle men - it was either the private property owner or the apartment management company who handled the leasing directly.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  I had pretty good luck with Zillow and Craigslist all the times I've tried There were a few outright lying apartment management companies, but I managed to look at some nice places being rented out directly by their owners and settled on a good one
- brandall10 5y ago
  Had an excellent experience finding my last two places from Zillow - one in SD and one in Denver. Truly wonderfully luxury 1 beds at below market prices from landlords who had this as their only secondary property. Tried the same thing with NYC and things went nowhere fast.
sjf 5y ago
You didn't even mention all the straight scam advertisements you have to wade through. Next time I move I am going to hire a PA to handle searching and making viewing appointments.
vmception 5y ago
> Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile Everyone that attempts to address the housing market just winds up realizing how lucrative it is to not fix it Once they get a little data and hire some agents its just a reversion to the mean
- lupire 5y ago
  How is it lucrative? Would a pad mapper intentionally make some listings bad in order to reduce effective supply?
  - vmception 5y ago
    The better or best example is Compass really
  - hattmall 5y ago
    Because you can use your position to promote expensive listings with more profit. A truly functional aggregator would lower prices by creating efficiencies. It's more profitable to let the market utilize price discrimination as long as the favor is to the supply side. If there is an oversupply then the aggregator would work to raise prices and would be more profitable. Right now the most profitable renter favoring model would be an aggregator that charges renters a fee. The problem is the same people don't rent frequently enough so customer acquisition costs would likely be too high.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Similar how truecar pisses off the dealers and had to stop offering useful info that lowered prices
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bee_rider 5y ago
"We have apartments which are inexpensive, spacious, and in a nice location" "Hooray, sounds great!" "Ok, which element of that list would you like?"
trinovantes 5y ago
Asymmetric information works in favor of the landlord so I doubt it'll ever get better barring some legislation -- which we know will also never happen because most voters and politicians are also landlords
timr 5y ago
> Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever? It seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better option, but what would it take to actually solve this? I hesitate to say it, but there is already a solution to this, and it has been the one that New York has had for years: you hire an agent. A good agent will sort through all of that for you, and streamline the process to the point where you can go from search to signing in under a week (if not quicker). Of course, there's the problem of bad agents, but that's true of anything. As you note, online services are often bad, as well. In other words, I don't see this as a problem without a solution; I see it as a problem without a software automated solution, which is true for a lot of problems in life, particularly ones that involve huge numbers of messy, opinionated people with different motivations and interests.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  What kind of agent? Just a. real estate agent?
  - klodolph 5y ago
    An apartment broker. Just like when buying a house, an apartment broker works on behalf of the landlord or the tenant. They charge a fee which is a percentage of a year’s rent. It is negotiable.
  - timr 5y ago
    Essentially. In NYC, many real estate agents will represent the renter for a service fee, just like they represent the buyer in a purchase transaction. It supplements the income that comes from the higher-value (but much less regular) money that they get from sales. There are agencies that make most of their business in this area, and generally have better rate structures (typically a month or two of rent, flat rate). Others want to charge you on a percentage basis, which you can negotiate, and obviously changes the incentive structure. All of these are "expensive" (relative to free), but worth it depending on how you value your time. Other people are (rightly) noting that there is risk of getting a scammy real estate agent, but that's true of any service. You have to look at reviews and trust your gut. Good real estate agents are motivated to do the right thing for you, because they see it as a marketing channel into larger sales in the future. Bad real estate agents are in it only for the immediate cash. These people behave in such obviously different ways that they're pretty easy to discriminate, in practice.
anoplus 5y ago
> With all of the modernization and streamlining that has happened in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful. If multiple candidates compete over the same apt, no searching method in the world will resolve the issue. Either you have high supply of apts, or a super intelligent city software that matches people to available apartments based on their socioeconomic and professional profiles.
kebman 5y ago
I think it depends on a few factors. The culture where you're searching. The laws. And the economy. And the available services. Where I'm from the law works pretty well, and there's really only one de-facto site that most people use for selling their pad, though Facebook has tried to take over some of the competition. I don't think you can get away from the stress of viewings, but IMHO it sounds like it's a lot more difficult to search where you're situated.
prpl 5y ago
> a myriad of sites aka it is decentralized
mosseater 5y ago
I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For example, any mention of 'Jesus' or 'God' automatically blocked the listing. Sure there might have been legitamate listings, but anytime I would go in and check 99% of the time it was a scam. You also have scams of people listing units they don't own or have any relation too. They ask for a security deposit up front and just pocket it, leaving the new tenant to have an awkward conversation with the real resident. Data is often unformatted too. Scraping out bedrooms and bathrooms can even be a challenge on websites like craigslist where the listing is just one big paragraph. (Not anymore, craigslist has come a long way, but that's how it was 10 years ago). Often times you had to just search for the closest number around the word "bed" or "bath". Don't even think about getting features like "driveway" or "laundry" out of them. In the end, we ended up utilizing some pretty intense ETL pipelines to collate historical data, census information, property assessment data, and other things to try to get a more accurate picture on our listings. But that didn't win out. What won out are the sites like Apartments.com or Zillow, where legitimate property owners can post their listings in a formatted searchable way. We could scrape them and post the same listings on our site, but at that point we were just pushing our customers to another platform that honestly worked better than our own. We couldn't have the most up to date data, that was determined by how fast we could go back to scrape a listing. And often times we were knee deep in a battle to avoid being blocked by these companies. Often times, after we had exhausted our proxies, the only thing left to use was Tor.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  What sort of scam would mention Jesus or God in the description?
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    The same as orthographic mistakes in postings or scam emails. They filter for more naive and gullible people.
neutronicus 5y ago
Where I live (Baltimore) a fair amount of the rental market still works by calling a number on a for rent sign in a window
ransom1538 5y ago
If you are in a hard market (SF) I would highly recommend stalking. Get a list of buildings you truly like. In SF I had like 10 I would kill to get into. When your about 1-2 months from your lease expiring, start stalking hard: call the managers, talk to people walking into the building, talk to the mail man - anything. Nice SF places rarely have openings. "Oh Mrs. Baskin passed away - we have will have a new listing in about a month". On it, I have my cashiers check, no site needed, my credit report printed, 4 references in hand, I even help the apartment manager carry in her groceries - and I don't mind hearing her stories. There are also a few families that own 20 or so buildings - once you get on their "good list" - you are in. The places you get are amazing. Clear views of the SF harbor, tucked away in PacHeights, full parking, cheaper rent etc. After doing this for 15 years I knew all the managers of those 10 buildings by name. My friends that "wing it" get sooo screwed. They go through listings, trying to piece if it is a nice place, always getting their initial deposit stolen, application fees swiped, going to open apartments 20 people deep, dealing with large corporate landlords, on and on. Make friends!
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Sounds like you should become an agent.
kurthr 5y ago
In really competitive markets it seems like you either get lucky, or you basically know someone in the area who can hook you by word-of-mouth. In the ancient "before times" there were also actual rental agencies where a human would look for an appropriate apartment for you. I didn't know about them, but a local NorCal person turned me on and it was the only way to find things. They followed all of the different local listings daily and knew the area fairly well (e.g. how parking, transport, different commutes would be). It was $25/mo and ~$100/yr for them to go through the listings call the renter, if necessary. They usually also collected $100 fee, if they hooked you up (though I'm sure you could work around it) with one of their (usually several times a week email of 5-10) available recommendations and usually a $50+ fee for running a "credit check". The reason it seemed to work was that the renters trusted the rental agency to only send them real referrals, and the agency knew all about scammers and fake listings, and daily follow-up. It only worked due to the relatively small area and and high volume. Each agent was looking for ~50-100 people during a month and making several $k/mo themselves, filling them typically in a few months. Like travel agents used to be an actual thing... but now you either do it yourself on-line, or you're going on some giant family cruise thing.
bmelton 5y ago
Plugging my site, but only because it addresses some of your core complaints, and may be helpful. Dwellsy.com has the largest inventory of any rental property site out there, is aiming for zero fraud (and has quite a few features implemented to prevent against it,) parses descriptions to more accurately represent the actual amenities (it's decent, but not perfect) and doesn't clump units in apartment buildings into one ranged price listing, as we prefer to have the units represented as individual listings. Hopefully it'll help, but feel free to reach out directly if you run into issues.
jareklupinski 5y ago
walk around the neighborhood you're thinking of renting in, and look around for signs advertising rentals with phone numbers on them. call them with the bdrm count you're looking for, and if they know exactly what building you're talking about and units they have available, sometimes they'll give you the code to walk right in and check the place out. you can use this convo to push the rate down a bit or ask for a rent concession, and since you're likely talking to the landlord/agency it'll be no-fee. that's how i've found my last 3 rentals :) gl!
- Rediscover 5y ago
  This. I was going to say the same: > walk around the neighborhood you're thinking of renting in...call them... It works far better in Belltown (Seattle) than the free "apartment shopper weekly" printed ones (which have glossy pictures and outrageous prices). Your entire post is spot-on. Thank You.
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    Worked for me when I moved to Redondo Beach.
tingletech 5y ago
When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, there was a store front around Market and Church that was an agency with apartment listings printed out on the windows like a real estate office. They ran my credit check, made me a packet with copies of it for each landlord, and set me up with appointments to see three units, one of which I rented. I think there was a fee in the $50 to $75 range, but it included the credit check and access to their listings.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Etheryte 5y ago

As someone who just jumped through all the hoops to find a new apartment, the pain is real. I think the main issue is that the incentives are misaligned from the perspective of the seeker. Where I'm currently at (the Netherlands), the market is dominated by agents. Using an agent makes sense from the perspective of the apartment owner — they will take care of managing the ads, initial screening, arranging viewings etc. Given how many people contact a single viewing, you definitely don't want them hitting your personal inbox or phone. From the agent's perspective, it's good to drive people to their company's website rather than one of the big aggregate ones. Having more people visit it means they're more likely to do business with that company specifically. Getting people to visit your company's site is pretty straightforward: they put up ads there earlier, often so much earlier that by the time you see an ad on an aggregate site, it's already fully booked for viewings. And that's how we end up with dozens of different company sites, each crappy in their own way, and in the middle of it all, people trying to find a home pulling their hair out, refreshing a bunch of different websites every few hours.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
amelius 5y ago
The question, though, is: why doesn't this converge to a single monopolist agency, like in the rest of capitalism?
- scythe 5y ago
  Guess who spends the most money on lobbying? https://www.statista.com/statistics/257344/top-lobbying-spenders-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/257344/top-lobbying-spen...
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    Love the dark pattern on that site's cookie popup. How annoying!
- colinhb 5y ago
  In my experience in NL makelaars (brokers) serve particular niches, and I expect they can outcompete larger firms that don’t understand the neighborhood or municipal market as well, the market segment (roughly price), the kind of buyer/renter, the kind of seller/leaser, not to mention just their access to “deal flow” in their networks unrelated to their expertise. Think it’s all related apartments and houses not really being fungible. ESIT: Also, more directly to GP’s experience, when I was in the market in NL I found the biggest aggregator to be very useful, which is apparently different from their experience: funda.nl
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Because it's a mostly unregulated market. A new competitor has minimal government regulations to satisfy in order to start and everyone and their dog can start doing this job (and believe me, I've met some interesting agents when looking for the best deals both looking for rent and renting out my property). The big centralised agencies don't really have a way to stop smaller agents offering cheaper services and serving different markets (even if they're just different neighbourhoods) is hard. This is how capitalism works when there is no government helping monopolies to form in the name of security / justice / anti-money laundering / insert-politician-buzzword-of-the-day.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

In San Francisco, when I was looking for an apartment,, I always ended up with an apartment with the worst pictures / missing things in the description on Craigslist, because they had less interest / were cheaper. The market for rentals is never efficient and will never be! People who post to Zillow with a perfect description know they can extract more money for it.

ghaff 5y ago
I bought my house in the late-ish 90s before the web was really a big thing and certainly before things like Google StreetView. I spent a lot of time driving around to see places where I ended up not even stopping the car once I got there. Today, there would be a lot more information available. However, as you suggest, I assume all that available information probably increases the efficiency of connecting a property with potential buyers/renters so you're less likely to luck into something that others just haven't found yet. (The funny thing is that the house I ended up buying turned out be being sold by someone I knew quite well at work.)
- sokoloff 5y ago
  We almost didn’t stop into the house we now live in. It was #10 of 10 of open houses on a rainy Saturday and we were just looking to get a sense of things we both liked/didn’t like. This listing had terrible photos and the building had almost no updates since 1993. We walked in and in 2 minutes knew we’d want to buy the place, in part because it showed so poorly and the sellers were motivated to close. Zillow was a thing, but nowhere near as big a force as it is now.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    When I saw the house I eventually bought, I had seen one property I was interested in but was on the fence about. When I saw this one I was pretty much sold. Great property. The house was old and very little had obviously been done with it for decades. And there were some things (like on the small side and one bathroom) that would probably have been showstoppers for a lot of people but weren't an issue for me. Various things cost me a fair bit of money, effort, and angst that I'm glad I didn't know about at the time. But, at the end of the day, I got a ridiculously good deal--especially by today's standards--for a semi-rural place only about an hour out of Boston.

distrill 5y ago

i don't share this experience at all. i've used zillow and apartments.com recently (found a place through apartments.com about a year ago and just found one through zillow a few weeks ago) and had no issues. the filter options work how you'd expect, and i wasn't put in touch with any middle men - it was either the private property owner or the apartment management company who handled the leasing directly.

Firmwarrior 5y ago
I had pretty good luck with Zillow and Craigslist all the times I've tried There were a few outright lying apartment management companies, but I managed to look at some nice places being rented out directly by their owners and settled on a good one
brandall10 5y ago
Had an excellent experience finding my last two places from Zillow - one in SD and one in Denver. Truly wonderfully luxury 1 beds at below market prices from landlords who had this as their only secondary property. Tried the same thing with NYC and things went nowhere fast.

sjf 5y ago

You didn't even mention all the straight scam advertisements you have to wade through. Next time I move I am going to hire a PA to handle searching and making viewing appointments.

vmception 5y ago

> Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile Everyone that attempts to address the housing market just winds up realizing how lucrative it is to not fix it Once they get a little data and hire some agents its just a reversion to the mean

lupire 5y ago
How is it lucrative? Would a pad mapper intentionally make some listings bad in order to reduce effective supply?
- vmception 5y ago
  The better or best example is Compass really
- hattmall 5y ago
  Because you can use your position to promote expensive listings with more profit. A truly functional aggregator would lower prices by creating efficiencies. It's more profitable to let the market utilize price discrimination as long as the favor is to the supply side. If there is an oversupply then the aggregator would work to raise prices and would be more profitable. Right now the most profitable renter favoring model would be an aggregator that charges renters a fee. The problem is the same people don't rent frequently enough so customer acquisition costs would likely be too high.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Similar how truecar pisses off the dealers and had to stop offering useful info that lowered prices
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bee_rider 5y ago

"We have apartments which are inexpensive, spacious, and in a nice location" "Hooray, sounds great!" "Ok, which element of that list would you like?"

trinovantes 5y ago

Asymmetric information works in favor of the landlord so I doubt it'll ever get better barring some legislation -- which we know will also never happen because most voters and politicians are also landlords

timr 5y ago

> Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever? It seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better option, but what would it take to actually solve this? I hesitate to say it, but there is already a solution to this, and it has been the one that New York has had for years: you hire an agent. A good agent will sort through all of that for you, and streamline the process to the point where you can go from search to signing in under a week (if not quicker). Of course, there's the problem of bad agents, but that's true of anything. As you note, online services are often bad, as well. In other words, I don't see this as a problem without a solution; I see it as a problem without a software automated solution, which is true for a lot of problems in life, particularly ones that involve huge numbers of messy, opinionated people with different motivations and interests.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
What kind of agent? Just a. real estate agent?
- klodolph 5y ago
  An apartment broker. Just like when buying a house, an apartment broker works on behalf of the landlord or the tenant. They charge a fee which is a percentage of a year’s rent. It is negotiable.
- timr 5y ago
  Essentially. In NYC, many real estate agents will represent the renter for a service fee, just like they represent the buyer in a purchase transaction. It supplements the income that comes from the higher-value (but much less regular) money that they get from sales. There are agencies that make most of their business in this area, and generally have better rate structures (typically a month or two of rent, flat rate). Others want to charge you on a percentage basis, which you can negotiate, and obviously changes the incentive structure. All of these are "expensive" (relative to free), but worth it depending on how you value your time. Other people are (rightly) noting that there is risk of getting a scammy real estate agent, but that's true of any service. You have to look at reviews and trust your gut. Good real estate agents are motivated to do the right thing for you, because they see it as a marketing channel into larger sales in the future. Bad real estate agents are in it only for the immediate cash. These people behave in such obviously different ways that they're pretty easy to discriminate, in practice.

anoplus 5y ago

> With all of the modernization and streamlining that has happened in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful. If multiple candidates compete over the same apt, no searching method in the world will resolve the issue. Either you have high supply of apts, or a super intelligent city software that matches people to available apartments based on their socioeconomic and professional profiles.

kebman 5y ago

I think it depends on a few factors. The culture where you're searching. The laws. And the economy. And the available services. Where I'm from the law works pretty well, and there's really only one de-facto site that most people use for selling their pad, though Facebook has tried to take over some of the competition. I don't think you can get away from the stress of viewings, but IMHO it sounds like it's a lot more difficult to search where you're situated.

prpl 5y ago

> a myriad of sites aka it is decentralized

mosseater 5y ago

I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For example, any mention of 'Jesus' or 'God' automatically blocked the listing. Sure there might have been legitamate listings, but anytime I would go in and check 99% of the time it was a scam. You also have scams of people listing units they don't own or have any relation too. They ask for a security deposit up front and just pocket it, leaving the new tenant to have an awkward conversation with the real resident. Data is often unformatted too. Scraping out bedrooms and bathrooms can even be a challenge on websites like craigslist where the listing is just one big paragraph. (Not anymore, craigslist has come a long way, but that's how it was 10 years ago). Often times you had to just search for the closest number around the word "bed" or "bath". Don't even think about getting features like "driveway" or "laundry" out of them. In the end, we ended up utilizing some pretty intense ETL pipelines to collate historical data, census information, property assessment data, and other things to try to get a more accurate picture on our listings. But that didn't win out. What won out are the sites like Apartments.com or Zillow, where legitimate property owners can post their listings in a formatted searchable way. We could scrape them and post the same listings on our site, but at that point we were just pushing our customers to another platform that honestly worked better than our own. We couldn't have the most up to date data, that was determined by how fast we could go back to scrape a listing. And often times we were knee deep in a battle to avoid being blocked by these companies. Often times, after we had exhausted our proxies, the only thing left to use was Tor.

aetherspawn 5y ago
What sort of scam would mention Jesus or God in the description?
- durnygbur 5y ago
  The same as orthographic mistakes in postings or scam emails. They filter for more naive and gullible people.

neutronicus 5y ago

Where I live (Baltimore) a fair amount of the rental market still works by calling a number on a for rent sign in a window

ransom1538 5y ago

If you are in a hard market (SF) I would highly recommend stalking. Get a list of buildings you truly like. In SF I had like 10 I would kill to get into. When your about 1-2 months from your lease expiring, start stalking hard: call the managers, talk to people walking into the building, talk to the mail man - anything. Nice SF places rarely have openings. "Oh Mrs. Baskin passed away - we have will have a new listing in about a month". On it, I have my cashiers check, no site needed, my credit report printed, 4 references in hand, I even help the apartment manager carry in her groceries - and I don't mind hearing her stories. There are also a few families that own 20 or so buildings - once you get on their "good list" - you are in. The places you get are amazing. Clear views of the SF harbor, tucked away in PacHeights, full parking, cheaper rent etc. After doing this for 15 years I knew all the managers of those 10 buildings by name. My friends that "wing it" get sooo screwed. They go through listings, trying to piece if it is a nice place, always getting their initial deposit stolen, application fees swiped, going to open apartments 20 people deep, dealing with large corporate landlords, on and on. Make friends!

rootusrootus 5y ago
Sounds like you should become an agent.

kurthr 5y ago

In really competitive markets it seems like you either get lucky, or you basically know someone in the area who can hook you by word-of-mouth. In the ancient "before times" there were also actual rental agencies where a human would look for an appropriate apartment for you. I didn't know about them, but a local NorCal person turned me on and it was the only way to find things. They followed all of the different local listings daily and knew the area fairly well (e.g. how parking, transport, different commutes would be). It was $25/mo and ~$100/yr for them to go through the listings call the renter, if necessary. They usually also collected $100 fee, if they hooked you up (though I'm sure you could work around it) with one of their (usually several times a week email of 5-10) available recommendations and usually a $50+ fee for running a "credit check". The reason it seemed to work was that the renters trusted the rental agency to only send them real referrals, and the agency knew all about scammers and fake listings, and daily follow-up. It only worked due to the relatively small area and and high volume. Each agent was looking for ~50-100 people during a month and making several $k/mo themselves, filling them typically in a few months. Like travel agents used to be an actual thing... but now you either do it yourself on-line, or you're going on some giant family cruise thing.

bmelton 5y ago

Plugging my site, but only because it addresses some of your core complaints, and may be helpful. Dwellsy.com has the largest inventory of any rental property site out there, is aiming for zero fraud (and has quite a few features implemented to prevent against it,) parses descriptions to more accurately represent the actual amenities (it's decent, but not perfect) and doesn't clump units in apartment buildings into one ranged price listing, as we prefer to have the units represented as individual listings. Hopefully it'll help, but feel free to reach out directly if you run into issues.

jareklupinski 5y ago

walk around the neighborhood you're thinking of renting in, and look around for signs advertising rentals with phone numbers on them. call them with the bdrm count you're looking for, and if they know exactly what building you're talking about and units they have available, sometimes they'll give you the code to walk right in and check the place out. you can use this convo to push the rate down a bit or ask for a rent concession, and since you're likely talking to the landlord/agency it'll be no-fee. that's how i've found my last 3 rentals :) gl!

Rediscover 5y ago
This. I was going to say the same: > walk around the neighborhood you're thinking of renting in...call them... It works far better in Belltown (Seattle) than the free "apartment shopper weekly" printed ones (which have glossy pictures and outrageous prices). Your entire post is spot-on. Thank You.
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  Worked for me when I moved to Redondo Beach.

tingletech 5y ago

When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, there was a store front around Market and Church that was an agency with apartment listings printed out on the windows like a real estate office. They ran my credit check, made me a packet with copies of it for each landlord, and set me up with appointments to see three units, one of which I rented. I think there was a fee in the $50 to $75 range, but it included the credit check and access to their listings.