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Ask HN: Are you doing anything to fix apartment rentals?

4 points by goodweeds ↗ HN
Craigslist SUCKS due to spam, 1996-era search, misposts, an overlimited posting format, a lack of keyword filtering (I could go on for days on why craigslist sucks. So could you, even if Craig gives us happy feelies) but they're really the only game in the bay area. Rent.com and Apartments.com have been a joke since their inception. Padmapper is alright, but definitely hampered by trying to sharecrop Craigslist without an api.

This market seems ripe for innovation and disruption. Before I jump into the game, I figure somebody else, or many other people are trying to build a better apartment search site. So, what's out there?

6 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] thread
carmen
when i moved to SF i walked around the TL and rang building managers of nicer buildings and asked to see what was available. in Boston the most up-to-date info was not online but in a steno book of a guy in a subbasement in the Fenway that connects to various buildings via utility tunnels, even getting to him required 2 elevator-trips and some stairs, but it really illuminated how things work. in between padmapper, hotpads, trulia, zillow and the exclusive broker-listings and MLS-shared rentals therein, as well as alumni-mailinglists/forums containing for-owner listings and carefully-crafted CL search-bookmarks and working with a couple human brokers it was possible to get a good sense of roughly everything in the market
orangecat
however the brokers still had stuff that was moving too fast to ever make it to a website

Considering one can easily get up-to-the-second stock quotes, this seems like a solvable problem.

I moved to NYC recently, and the apartment hunting process is ridiculous. There's no reason for floor plans and availability to not be online and easily searchable; I'm assuming there's some sort of regulatory capture by the brokers.

willpower101
At this point I'm convinced that it's going to require new regulations to make this happen. The information is not required to be kept open and available on a large scale. There are no repercussions for having an out of date floorplan with the building commission. Neither owners nor brokers have any incentive to put this information online during vacancy because it creates unnecessary work in a market where an opening sells itself. And when that vacancy is filled they have no incentive because they have better things to do.

If you could somehow incentivise tenants, owners, or brokers to update this information when they move in or just before they move out then you could solve this. But I don't think that's going to happen without deep pockets lobbying an addon bill in washington.

chris_gogreen
Some communities have made rental owners register their properties as rentals. I live in a college town and we have problems with uncut lawns, trash, noise violations. The rental registry is a way to track the actual owner of the property and not the sometimes ever changing occupant.
malandrew
It is a solvable problem. The biggest problem I see with every single site out there, especially those in Seller's markets, is that they cater to the buyer first. The only apartment guide that will every work in a major city will target the person who owns the apartment and it will help that person (1) maximize revenue per month && (2) make sure the person doing the renting is trustworthy and will always be able to pay rent on time.
rorrr
The problem is to convince a lot of apartment owners to post and update their apartments on your site, especially if you're just starting and have just a few visitors.

It's a catch 22 problem, you need a lot of money to gain traffic at the start.

Most large building owners just let real estate agents do all this work, which have their own databases that are great quality, but it will cost you a fortune to tap into any of them.