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I need to find an apartment

mattrighetti.com

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Re: I need to find an apartment

#311

Post by est31 »

alex-nt wrote: post #279
est31 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am looking for an apartment in eastern Europe. I was shocked to see listings with the windows covered in Microsoft Paint. I was able to find the location in some instances by finding the same property in other listings (the images were still slightly altered). This is the amateur move, what I see more often is image alteration so that the light coming through the windows makes it impossible to see what is outside.…

Oh it is definitely possible to avoid this. It's kind of an arms race. The overexposed window effect might be reversed with computational photography for example. Maybe one can just lower brightness in an image editor and discover that there is a residual of the outside left. You might use "looking around a corner" like tricks on white walls, etc etc.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#312

Post by mikojan »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #88
wildmanx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a law called "Mietpreisbremse" makes it entirely unattractive to rent out. That's a strict regulation on how much rent you are allowed to take. And that's just the direct financial aspect. Once a tenant lives in your place, it's really hard to get rid of them. Even if they act like total scumbags, trash the place, disturb the neighbors, pay their rent late. No reasonable investor finds it attractive to build…

Berlin politics also seriously discuss seizing landlords' properties [1]. It's stupid. It's illegal. But it makes the potential downside of renting out a home the value of the property. (Or the cost of defending against an illegal law.) [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1061333538/berlin-voted-for-t...

It's not illegal. It's in the German constitution. Land is seized all the time, too. E. g. when the autobahn or mining operations are expanded. Nobody bats an eye there. It's only when corporations shift from being beneficiaries of disappropriation to being the target of such laws that the whole world all of a sudden is outraged.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#313

Post by mikojan »

koevet wrote: post #276
mschuster91 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is bordering on propaganda. First of all: the problem at the core is that Berlin is pretty much built out, there is not much space any more to expand to. Yes, skyscrapers could be a solution, but everyone seriously thinking about this gets invited to look at Frankfurt am Main and then forget about the idea because that city is simply hideous. Skyscrapers are very unwelcome in Germany because of that example…

Berlin pretty much built out? The city has a huge "hole" in the center - Tempelhofer Feld. 355 hectares of land that at some point it was decided to leave untouched. Complete waste of space that could be used to build thousands of units.

Anyone who lived in Berlin in the early 2000s can attest to the bizarre real estate situation back then.

The idea that the Tempelhofer Feld would have become anything but a mall with adjacent luxury apartments is bonkers.

The German constitutional court had just forced Berlin to sell of most of its housing infrastructure and the mayor and his confidants clearly were either unwilling or incapable of enforcing laws that would have ensured some form of public control and affordable housing options.

This was the time when people were offering tours putting all these vacant buildings on display that were left there waiting for the rent moratorium to end. When corporations freely redesignated large and central areas to the next biggest mall and luxury apartment project.

Edit: wording

Re: I need to find an apartment

#314

Post by mikojan »

aqme28 wrote: post #34

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! "

LOL you get answers back?!

Re: I need to find an apartment

#315

Post by rodonn »

01100011 wrote: post #156

Renting is fundamentally broken. You submit precious personal info over to a random stranger along with payment to check your credit. Last time I checked, this fee is $25-50 USD. You've now given them enough information to steal your identity. You also may need to do this multiple times if you're rejected. The person receiving this information rarely has identity protection measures in place and you receive no guaran…

Zillow does have a product like this: pay one application fee and you can reuse the background check across as many apartments as you apply to in a month. The biggest downside is that it only works for landlords that chose to accept the service.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#317

Post by mattrighetti »

WaffleIronMaker wrote: post #316

The author might be able to benefit from using Promise.all() to perform his async searches concurrently. Also, I would recommend closing each page when you are done with it, using page.close().

I've received a PR suggesting just that [0], my concern is

> Only thing that concerns me is that it will spawn n parallel requests to the website which could consume a lot of memory since we're talking about spawning a new tab with Puppeteer (Chrome :sigh:) for each link.

[0]: https://github.com/mattrighetti/athome-scraper/pull/1

Re: I need to find an apartment

#318

Post by asoneth »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #221
asoneth wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner and I were looking for a walkable urban neighborhood but ultimately ended up in a small town with a pub, market, cafe, store... and a train to the big city. Couldn't be happier, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is single.

Likewise, chose a cute little New England town when I realized that the benefits of living in a city are mostly... drunks, drugs, and concerts that are neat, but I'm unlikely to attend. There's culture and museums and lots of different food in cities, but all I really need is a small smattering of decent establishments in exactly the vein you just mentioned. And of course a good environment for working from home.

Same. Given our requirements and price range we would not be living within walking distance of the city museums or cultural amenities anyway, and we would be about as far a walk from the closest supermarket or cafe as we are now.

I think there is something to be said for New England towns where the design of the town center predates the automobile and is therefore pleasantly dense and walkable. They just don't seem to make towns like that any more.

If you can be 100% remote and don't need the transit options to the big city then just a little further out you can find charming towns for even less.

Re: I need to find an apartment

#319

Post by denysvitali »

bogomipz wrote: post #178
denysvitali wrote: post #3

Interesting article: I did something similar but for Zürich (finding a low-price, but good apartment there is almost impossible). I did follow a different approach though, and reverse engineered the APIs of the most common rental listing websites here. I didn't publish the code (or better said, I didn't make it public), but it's similar to yours. Instead of SQLite I used a PostGis database where I stored the apartmen…

Interesting. I am curious how did the ultimately play you for you? I'd be curious to hear the outcome. Thanks for the links.

Found a really cheap apartment, although a bit small, in a very convenient location.

The apartment was also new. I'd say a very good price/value ratio.

I now moved away from Zurich, but that apartment was very convenient. When I organized the viewing, ~100 people were interested and ~30 visited the apartment.

Obviously in the end only one got it (:

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