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When I searched for my apartment, I was able to reverse engineer the home's address sometimes when the general vicinity was specified, then looking at the pictu
by est31 5y ago
When I searched for my apartment, I was able to reverse engineer the home's address sometimes when the general vicinity was specified, then looking at the pictures, and comparing them with Google street view. This was a manual process however and only worked if enough outside views were available. Despite the time effort, you still spent less time on it per house than making an appointment for a viewing, getting there, and looking at it. If Google allows you to download the street views for an entire city, one might build an ML solution to bring up candidates at least.
Similarly, in the city where I studied for university, I immediately knew where the house was located just from outside pictures of it in the ad, at least for the districts of the city I was familiar with.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoI use a similar process to look at interesting job listings sent to me unsolicited by recruiters. You can anonymize the company but it only takes a few unique phrases to locate the posting with Google.
- alex-nt 5y agoI am looking for an apartment in eastern Europe. I was shocked to see listings with the windows covered in Microsoft Paint. I was able to find the location in some instances by finding the same property in other listings (the images were still slightly altered). This is the amateur move, what I see more often is image alteration so that the light coming through the windows makes it impossible to see what is outside. The same apartment is usually posted by 5-10 agencies, pictures and description almost identical, with different location. You get different responses depending who you call. I hope to end my suffering this year and buy something.
- est31 5y agoOh it is definitely possible to avoid this. It's kind of an arms race. The overexposed window effect might be reversed with computational photography for example. Maybe one can just lower brightness in an image editor and discover that there is a residual of the outside left. You might use "looking around a corner" like tricks on white walls, etc etc.