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$.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Renting regulations are pretty notorious in Switzerland. There seems to be a rule for everything & it is notoriously hard to get rid of a bad renter. Also, as a foreigner, it is often difficult to acquire property in certain kantons.
If I had to guess I'd say the demand is for "housing within N kilometers of point X" and there is nowhere left to build housing in that area, whether because of physical constraints or legal/regulatory constraints (e.g. can't get a permit to demolish that block and put up a dense high rise).
(Edit for non-USA-ian units, since we were talking about Geneva.)
> the problem is not choosing the apartment, but being chosen among all the other people who want the same apartment you do
Do you have some sort of rent control or other laws in place keeping people from raising prices? If 20 people want an apartment, one of them would usually be willing to pay $50 or $100 more per month to get the place. These kinds of shortages were a big problem in Los Angeles and New York until they relaxed rent control.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually the guy who Chris ended up using was based in a middle eastern country. The average wage there is $15/day, so $3 per hour is a significant upgrade.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone going to systematize this and create a curated list of vetted apartments for a fee? Maybe something like $9 for a month of access to one geographic area.
I've considered it briefly for PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com). It would be very expensive to do for all cities, though - the volumes of listings they would have to look through are pretty enormous if you were doing it generally. One of the big things you get out of this is that you tell the person exactly what you want, and they throw away everything else.
Very cool website, nice work. Question: how do you get the data from craigslist...is there an official api,or do you scrape the site (and if so wouldn't you eventually get blocked)?
Nah, no official API, just parsing the site. It's possible that they'd choose to block it, though I've gone out of my way to give them no reason to. PadMapper's CL crawler is built to be as light as possible on their servers, and the crawling is constrained to a very small subset of the site. If it gets blocked, PM has other sources, but it would definitely suck.
If you tried to make something that crawled the entire site, I would imagine that they would block you pretty quickly, though, if only for the load it would cause.
Any particular libraries or techniques you used for the crawling / parsing, or just coded up something from scratch for each site you crawl? (I think I noticed you even do kijiji.)
Businesses have sprang up to help people find apartments, so it is possible to outsource your apartment hunt too, but it costs much more than 90$.