New Yorkers: help me defeat the evil NYC real estate market

Hi guys

I am an NYC based hacker who has had enough of dealing with the horrible process of finding and getting an apartment. One of the major issues you have is that you can only trust what the broker tells you to be true, ie "trust me, this is a good deal."

I have a solution: collect the rents of people in the city, and get a general idea of how yours compares (or how much you should be paying for a neighborhood if you are planning on moving).

Right now the app is very simple: it's just collecting data. Ultimately I'm not 100% sure how I'd use the data, but it would likely be open/free via an API etc. on top of my product. One vision I have is something like a Yelp.com but for real estate.

I am open to your ideas, and I'd love to get any feedback about the idea you have (I know the site itself isn't much). If you are a New Yorker, I'd really appreciate if you could take 30 seconds and fill out the form.

Thanks! NYC RentEnforcer

This is a good idea, but maybe there's a way for you to display some data before signing up? Right now, there's nothing on the site at all except for the form requesting my information. After I submit it, there's a message there's not enough data for my address, and a request for email. At this point, it would be helpful to see what exactly I'm signing up for.

Maybe examples for different addresses, or average data per neighborhood? I recently was looking for a new apartment, and I found this very useful: http://www.tregny.com/manhattan_rental_market_report

If I've never lived in NYC, or am planning to move there, there is no way for this to be useful to me. Let us see the data once you've gotten enough without putting anything in. Or do it glassdoor style where you only partially see data.

Agreed. A simple one-image visualization example (can be part of design/background, even) of what you'll send me when you're done collecting data would go a long way to explaining what you're doing, exactly.

Seconded. Not sure about New York, but the real estate market over here easily reaches Darth Vader levels in terms of evilness.