291–300 of 319 posts
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.
I'm currently searching in Berlin and the market has become insane. Here's a response I got yesterday: "With more than 1200 prospective tenants, it was really difficult for the landlord to make a decision. Unfortunately, we have to inform you that the landlord has decided on other prospective tenants. Thank you for your understanding! "
And don't Germans traditionally prefer renting over owning? Or so I've heard (but I'm not German).
May be I am too old fashioned but I have never been able to select apartments like this mathematically . Sure I have used methods like this to shortlist the apartments, but I still need to visit them and feel for the place before commiting to one place.
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Housing website https://funda.nl is pretty dominant in the Netherlands. Why would you need to search many agent's websites when nearly all inventory shows up on funda.nl ? 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).
You're right in that most listings eventually end up on sites such as Funda, Pararius etc. However, almost all offers go online on an agent website first, oftentimes considerably so. Your milage will vary of course, personally I started using agent sites after calling an ad that had been up on Pararius for 5 minutes yielded the response that the viewing list is already full. Turned out it had already been up on the a…
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 used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For exampl…
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> We couldn't have the most up to date data, that was determined by how fast we could go back to scrape a listing. And often times we were knee deep in a battle to avoid being blocked by these companies. Often times, after we had exhausted our proxies, the only thing left to use was Tor.
The flip side is if you are looking at listing from small property management companies, they are probably low on resources. The websites aren't very well optimized to serve thousands of concurrent users. Every request to search inventory hits SQL Server which is probably one small box with no automatic failover. I don't like it but unless we somehow help these people better optimize their website (how?),they will continue using heavy handed tactics like blocking scrapers.
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How is mandatory data reporting linked to bankruptcy? The more information available to the market, the better and more efficient they run.
All it would do is create a race to the bottom. Athome seems to be a data aggregator of many listing sites; I can see open data on the actual apartment lister’s end being useful (ie. Apartments.com) but athome is the ones doing the aggregation, so if they had to turn the data over they just wouldn’t create that data in the first place since there would be no revenue stream for doing so.
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 used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For exampl…
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Even if the population doesn't change, if more purchase power moves in (e.g. struggling artists move out, software developers move in) the market will go up. Also, Berlin was an odd place compared to other cities in Europe, when it comes to housing. Looking from the outside it seems like it was due for an upwards correction after 3 decades of pretty low rents since the fall of The Wall.
'more purchase power moves in (e.g. struggling artists move out, software developers move in) the market will go up' I don't understand what you mean or how it relates to supply and demand.
Say there's a supply on 100 apartments and a demand from 120 artists. 100 will pay €1k per month, and 20 will have to leave the city. Landlords can't increase to €1050 a month because nobody can afford that.
If demand is higher than supply, rents will increase, but if the demand is entirely from people earning €1000 a month those rents won't increase past €1000 a month.
However you have a demographic on €5000 a month move in, they can afford higher rents. The same 100 apartments exist, and there's a demand from 120 people, but now those people are earning €5k a month. Rents thus shoot up to take all the money that can be spent on rent, because the alternative is moving out of the city and thus not being able to earn the €5k/month.
The people owning the property do well in this situation, and thus don't want supply to increase to the points that there is more supply than demand
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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.
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I used to work at a startup that aggregated apartment listings. Long gone now, we couldn't compete with Zillow or Apartments.com. But what we were doing is just aggregating all of the rental websites we could possibly scrape into one interface. It was hard. There are so many scams out there. If you are not hand curating listings, you have to rely on somewhat novel approaches to filter out all the bad data. For exampl…
What sort of scam would mention Jesus or God in the description?