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I need to find an apartment

mattrighetti.com

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Re: I need to find an apartment

#21

Post by bombcar »

dangus wrote: post #8

I appreciate the talent and ingenuity behind this apartment hunting project. I just wonder if OP ever thought of contacting a broker? I would have done that before I wrote a single line of code. Scraping all this data is really great, but a human broker is going to know the local area and the other human nuances of apartment searching in the local area. Plus, brokers already have access to their own software that’s d…

In my experience finding a broker who actually does broker work is hard enough for housing you’ll buy. Even harder for just renting. The money isn’t there for them to do much more than setup a few saved searches.

Half the houses we looked at fit the profile we wanted but we found ourselves.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#22

Post by mattrighetti »

wildmanx wrote: post #19

Looks to me like procrastination from doing what he actually needs to do. Which is to click on those links to find an apartment. Tech won't solve that. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/974/

I partially agree! But atm I’m using the tool a lot, it’s working well and as expected. Let’s say that for the time it took me to develop it was definitely worth it

Re: I need to find an apartment

#23

Post by bluefirebrand »

dazbradbury wrote: post #9
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

At least OP had the full address of those apartment on that website, so he could plot them on the map. Here in Austria, most leeches, sorry, realtors, avoid putting the street in the ad to prevent you from trying to contact the property directly and bypassing their fees, so apartment hunting is even more of a headache. Still, amazing work from OP.

There are genuine privacy concerns at play here, for example there may be existing tenants/owners who don't want people randomly knocking on the door because someone saw an ad online. Or getting a bunch of junk mail because there is an extra data point about the property. I guess the variety of concerns will vary from country to country depending on local laws / existing open data though.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect to be able to list real estate for rent or sale, and also expect privacy with regards to the address.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#24

Post by fennecfoxen »

est31 wrote: post #12
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

At least OP had the full address of those apartment on that website, so he could plot them on the map. Here in Austria, most leeches, sorry, realtors, avoid putting the street in the ad to prevent you from trying to contact the property directly and bypassing their fees, so apartment hunting is even more of a headache. Still, amazing work from OP.

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 ther…

I 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.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#25

Post by thatfrenchguy »

haswell wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#27

Post by distrill »

haswell wrote: post #4

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 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.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#28

Post by sjf »

haswell wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#29

Post by pimlottc »

It frustrates me that there are so many "information programs" like these that are computationally easy to solve but rely on the free availability of information. Sadly, companies like athome.lu have no interest in sharing this data and so here we are in 2022, still having to manually search multiple sites.

In Internet olden times, we dreamed about automated agents that would run searches on your behalf, scour the web to compare prices and hunt down things you were interested in. But user-centric fantasies like this don't make fortunes, so walled gardens is what we ended up with.

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