111–120 of 319 posts
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Any place I can’t walk on well-traveled sidewalks to a coffee shop, restaurant, grocery store, etc. is a place not fit for human habitation.
I wonder how humans survived for the first, oh, 99% or so of the time we've been on earth?
So much sophistication based on at least partly incomplete, filtered/distorted, and inaccurate data. So much important aspects that cannot be in an ad or intentionally left out and can only be extracted by painstaking efforts. Even the initial filtering out could be unreliable then.
In my case, the tool was ultimately useless because I discovered the way SF housing worked for nice apartments was 1) Openings are posted on Friday 2) Saturday, open house collects applications 3) Deal is signed on Sunday and post taken down. Anything my crawler picked up was stuff that was overpriced or in bad condition. For all my sophistication, the dataset was just the bad stuff.
Apartment hunting is a great example of needing to know the underlying behaviors of your dataset before you use it to make decisions.
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The same old lie over and over again. Rent control is limiting the profit you can make with renting out. It doesn't stop profit in the first place. And btw: new built appartments have almost free price setting.
The regulation gives absolutely insane incentives. In my case (old contract in hip mitte area), it was easier to keep it and for my gf to rent another apartment on the outskirt where her work is as she can deduct the full rent from tax. Effective price for renting two apartments is lower than one in between the center and suburb.
Doppelte Haushaltsführung is a tax relief for people needing a 2nd place close to work. Also the work of your gf needs to be at least 1 hour away from the main apartment [1], she has to pay at least 10% of the cost of the main apartment to be allowed to deduct it (and maybe more requirements that I'm forgetting right now). She also has to pay 15% additional Zweitwohnungssteuer on the rent of the 2nd apartment.
[1] https://www.haufe.de/personal/entgelt/verwaltungsregeln-zur-...
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 2…
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> 1:1200 is probably worse than most selective universities By two orders of magnitude. Ivies range from about 1:20 to 1:10 in non-covid times.
It's sort of a meaningless comparison though. A huge amount of self-selection goes on before an application to an elite university is even filled out.
Probably a lot less self-selecting out than you think.
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 2…
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.
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> 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
How is it lucrative? Would a pad mapper intentionally make some listings bad in order to reduce effective supply?
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 2…
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 et…
I find it much preferable to North American sites like https://realtor.ca that think that number of baths is more important than floorspace (which to my utter amazement is often not even available).
Something tells me you're joining a big online book store ;-).
Tell me when you're in town for a beer, would love to hear how this unfolds.