One of them just posted some great visualizations of median rents and rent distributions that she extracted from some PadMapper data. She seems to have been more rigorous with her assumptions than most infographic makers looking for pageviews typically seem to be, so it’s worth a look. And it’s just plain interesting.

Here’s a geographic (and interactive!) map-based breakdown of median rents

A violin plot of the distributions

And the associated blog post for the geographic breakdown

I’m thinking about doing something more specifically tailored to the vacation rentals to replace the little checkbox, because the current search interface isn’t a great fit for them – for example, date availability is a pretty basic part of searching for a vacation rental, and monthly prices, while nice for their consistency with the rest of the site, are not usually what people care about in a vacation rental. So, I have more work to do. But for now, I thought it would be interesting to include them and see whether people found that useful.

If you have any feedback or notice any issues that probably aren’t things I just haven’t gotten to yet, please send me email at padmapper@gmail.com

Happy hunting!
Eric

PS: Lots of people I talk to don’t seem to realize that CL is back in the results, so spread the word! In other news, the lawsuit with Craigslist is still ongoing.

—

Everyone has a list of “deal breakers” when searching for a new apartment. These can include from price, storage space, windows, and many times, cell phone reception. While you can’t change many of these items, poor cell phone reception is actually one which can be solved. We’ve put together a list of options for ways to improve cell phone reception and make it that much easier to find your perfect place.

1. Jump Ship

The first option is the most straightforward, and that is to switch cellular carriers. If you’re not in a contract and another carrier provides better service in your apartment, switching carriers might be the easiest way to solve your signal problem. Unfortunately, most people in the US are in multi-year contracts, which cost a pretty penny to break, so this isn’t always a great option.

2. Femtocell

The second option is a device which the cellular carriers sell or give away themselves, called a femtocell (also known as a microcell). A femtocell is a device that looks like a wireless router and acts like a mini cell phone tower right in your apartment. It connects to the broadband Internet connection in your apartment, and it routes all of your calls through the Internet, rather over the cell tower network. In the past, some customers with exceptionally bad reception were able to get a femtocell for free, but that happens very rarely these days. Femtocells may also help with reception problems related to cell tower congestion, rather than just signal strength issues.

A femtocell could be a great solution, but there are some downsides to be aware of. The device requires a fast and reliable Internet connection, so it won’t work if you have a slow or spotty connection. Most femtocells have a built-in GPS receiver to ensure that it’s being used in the authorized location, so you’ll often need to place the femtocell near a window to receive a GPS signal. Lastly, since femtocells are sold by your carrier, you may not qualify for one, depending on your location, proximity to neighbors, and other factors.

If everyone in your apartment has the same carrier and you have a reliable Internet connection, a femtocell could certainly be the solution to your cell phone signal troubles. To find out more about femtocells and if they’ll work for you, call your cell phone carrier, or check out one of the following:
AT&T: www.att.com/standalone/3gmicrocell/

Verizon: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/device/network-extender

Sprint: http://now.sprint.com/airave/

T-Mobile: Does not offer a microcell. Instead, their phones offer calling over wifi, essentially VOIP. If you can’t use wifi and you threaten to switch, they sometimes offer a discounted Cel-Fi signal booster. This can be seen (but not obtained) here: http://support.t-mobile.com/community/phones_data_devices/t-mobile/signal_booster

3. Signal Booster

The last solution is a cell phone signal booster. Instead of creating a new signal like a femtocell does, a cell phone signal booster amplifies an existing cell phone signal so that it’s strong enough to cover your entire apartment. It works by taking an existing cell phone signal from a nearby good location, such as outside your apartment, boosting it and rebroadcasting it inside. Installing a cell phone signal booster is a little more difficult than a femtocell, but it has some advantages that may make it worth the effort.

The major advantage of a cell phone signal booster is that it can amplify the signal of multiple carriers at the same time, unlike femtocells which only work with a single carrier. This may be important if you have other people in the apartment with different cell providers, or frequently have visitors over that need to make calls or have 3G data access. Additionally, a signal booster does not require an Internet connection to function. Finally, when you purchase a cell phone signal booster, it’s not regulated by a third party, so you’re free to place it wherever you’d like in your apartment without it being monitored.

While signal boosters do have some benefits over femtocells, they also have some disadvantages. As the name implies, a signal booster will only work if there is an existing signal to amplify. If you get a good enough signal by a window to make a call or reliably send a text message, a signal booster should work, but any less and you’ll find it ineffective. Small signal boosters will be in the same price range as a femtocell, but if you have a larger apartment or a house, it’s likely that a larger signal booster will end up being more expensive. Signal boosters require the outside and inside antennas to be far enough apart so that their isn’t any feedback between to the two (think of holding a microphone too close to a speaker) which can make installation more difficult, especially if you need to put an antenna on your building’s roof to get enough separation or a decent signal. Finally, with the introduction of 4G, choosing the best signal booster has become more difficult. A standard dual-band signal booster will work for most carrier’s 2G and 3G networks, but the new 4G networks use completely different frequencies so if you need 4G data signal boosting in addition to phone calls, you’ll need a booster specific to your carrier.

Cell phone signal booster systems will vary based on how large of a space they can cover, the frequencies they support, where you can mount the external antenna, and so on. To find out more about cell phone signal boosters for your home or apartment, contact a provider like us (UberSignal.com) that can answer any questions you might have and help you choose the right solution for your needs.

Having a reliable cell phone signal in your home or apartment is important for day to day living, and hopefully one of these options can help you out if you have poor signal currently. If you’ve had success with one of these options in the past, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

[Editor's note: Landlines can be a decent last resort ]

But then I did some back of the envelope estimates of how much of people’s time and effort it would waste if I didn’t, and it became clear how much less nice it is to waste the time of millions of apartment hunters out of stubbornness or some clearly inaccurate assumption about the will of the community. If it takes half of PadMapper’s millions of monthly users 3 hours longer now to find an apartment, that’s over 350 man-years wasted per month, or 5 lifetimes. That really pisses me off. Apartment hunting is an activity which, unless you enjoy it or it teaches you something, adds no value to the world, and should be over as quickly as humanly possible so that you can get back to doing other, more productive things.

So, effective as soon as I can bring the new code up (almost certainly by the time you read this), I’m bringing the Craigslist search results back. This will be courtesy of the fine folks at 3taps, who provide an API for data about Craigslist postings that they gather via indirect means and so aren’t subject to CL’s Terms of Use. It’s not nice of me to do from Craigslist’s perspective, and I’d really love to just work with them to solve these problems, but my conscience is clear. I’m still going to send all traffic back to them and all that jazz.

Thanks to everyone who sent them letters, there were a surprisingly large number of you. I was a bit depressed that there didn’t seem to be much of a response from them, but it was pretty incredible to see the outpouring of support (still ongoing), and I really appreciate you all taking the time out to help out with this.

Happy hunting, everyone.
Eric

Update: Edited for language, it was immature of me to curse, sorry.

Update2: There seems to be a lot of confusion, so I should clarify that CL’s legal claim was about their TOU, not about copyright, since PadMapper isn’t reposting the listings, only summarizing bedrooms, bathrooms, price, etc. and linking to the original to read more. Using 3taps just makes it so it’s not a TOU issue.

A couple years ago, when I thought seriously that Craigslist might ask me to remove their listings and that I should have a backup plan, I created PadLister for listing directly on PadMapper. Over time it started to seem like CL was probably OK with PadMapper, so I haven’t pushed PadLister at all except for a little link on PadMapper. Many of you are now asking me about direct listing options, so it seems like I should let everyone know about it now.

With Craigslist gone, PadMapper is likely missing a lot of the best sublet/small landlord options, so I’d really like to get small landlords to list directly.

So, if you or anyone you know wants to find a tenant, let them know that they should post on PadLister (they should also post on Craigslist – PadLister helps with that, actually). By doing that, they’ll get the almost-undivided attention of lots of PadMapper’s millions of searchers, and they’ll get to use PadLister’s handy features for managing the search for a tenant. It’s a free service.

http://www.padlister.com , or go to PadMapper and hit the “Post a Pad” link.

It’d obviously be better if PadMapper just got Craigslist back, so hopefully Craigslist will change their mind or improve their apartment searching interface soon, if that’s what prompted this, but with peak apartment hunting season upon us, I’d like to give you guys as many tools as possible and make PadMapper useful again quickly. Help spread the word to every landlord you know! They’ll get a lot of free advertising, and the more listings there are, the better PadMapper will be for everyone.

Thanks everyone for your overwhelming support in this, I’ve gotten hundreds of emails about this, most of them extremely nice. I’ve been trying to reply to as many as I can, but I apologize if I don’t get to yours, they’ve come in faster than I’ve been able to respond.

Missed Connections: M 4 PM

Me: Starving student with gleam in his eye trying to make his way for the summer at a Silicon Valley startup. 6ft, athletic build, loves to use online tools such as padmapper.com to effectively ensure he isn’t homeless this summer.

You: Savvy proprietors of the world’s best informal apartment and sublet listings (among other things) website. You realize the value that Padmapper and other tools add over the rudimentary Craigslist interface. You also support entrepreneurs who are looking to improve the lives of others by building a personalized, efficient way to track listings at your website, sending you additional traffic.

I saw you on the internet a few months ago before you filed a Cease and Desist letter. I was struggling to land an internship out in the Bay. You smiled at me and I smiled back, but then you left with some other guy. I hope you’ll return and realize the usefulness of Padmapper and how great an opportunity it is for Craigslist listings to be included. Hope to sit down for coffee and potentially something more substantial.

· Please do contact this poster with agreements or disagreements with statements to help clarify his understanding

UPDATE:
I’m bringing Craigslist listings back! Here’s the blog post.

If you or any of your friends that PadMapper has helped would like to weigh in and tell them how PadMapper has helped you search through Craigslist, you can contact them at:

jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO
craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder

If you do contact them, please, please keep it civil. Perhaps if they see how many people PadMapper has helped, they’ll be willing to consider changing their minds.

PadMapper still has a lot of other sources, I’ll be adding more, and I’ll keep mapping pads, but it’s a sad day for pad mapping and apartment hunting. Craigslist is a really important source of apartment listings, and I hope we can get it back someday.

Thanks everyone,
Eric ☮

UPDATE: Many of you have asked me how you can post to PadMapper now that Craigslist is gone. I just posted about PadLister, a completely free way to post directly to PadMapper. I still want to get Craigslist back on there, but in the meantime, it’d be great if you guys could encourage any landlords you know to post their vacancies on PadLister as well (they should, of course, continue to post on Craigslist). Alternately, you can post to Oodle, RentalHomesPlus, Rent.com, ApartmentFinder, or one of the more local sources PadMapper picks up. Of these, Oodle is also free.

UPDATE 2:
If your area is looking empty without CList, you may want to enable Rent.com’s listings to show up. Look under “Show More Filters” and check that on if it’s not.

UPDATE 3:
I’m bringing Craigslist listings back! Here’s the blog post.

Happy hunting!
Eric

Now, back to improving the site (actually, the iOS app, currently).

Happy hunting,
Eric

Then at 12PM on Thursday, with 12 hours of voting to go, the Webby Awards decided close the doors and hide the percentages. The stated reason was to keep the anticipation high until they officially announced the winners 5 days later.

We were bummed that we wouldn’t get to see the end of the race, but then around 4PM, we figured out how to see the percentages again! Whether intentional or not, the voting site was set up such that if we logged out and logged back in again in the Chrome browser using Facebook login, we could see the voting breakdowns again. Logging in and out to look at voting results is a pain, though, so when we saw the percentages were basically the same as 4 hours before, we went back to work on more productive projects. Since the voting had basically stabilized to a ~1-2% fluctuation per day due to the large number of votes from the long voting period and because there were only 8 hours left for voting, we were feeling good about PadMapper’s chances of winning the popular vote. We were in such a good mood that we made ourselves lamb chops for dinner. With ice cream!

Then at 10:40PM, we got curious and we peeked again at the voting results. We were still in first place, but Apartment List had pulled up dramatically. We smelled something fishy. We’re not usually the suspicious type, but we’d had a bad experience dealing with Apartment List before, so we decided to track the voting closely.

Here is where things get crazy. Watch closely.

Below are the voting breakdowns for the Webby Awards Real Estate Category at various points on the last day of voting for the top 3 contenders, all times in PDT:

Needless to say, we were a little emotional for the 50 minutes between 10:40 and 11:30. First crossing our fingers because the race was so tight, then calling “Foul!” on the couch in our living room. By the end, it was like getting to the end of the first Game of Thrones book and, all of a sudden, [redacted] lost his [redacted]! Then as now, we were shocked and unhappy.

Math says that new votes for Apartment List alone in those 50 minutes accounted for at least 7% of all votes in the contest over the 2-week contest. That’s 7% of the votes in 0.2% of the contest time. Aside from this sheer volume of votes, 5 other things seemed fishy:

A) The movement observed happened after 10:40PM on the West Coast. That means it was 1:40AM on the East Coast, on a weeknight.
B) Throughout this flurry of activity, Apartment List was the only site to gain in percentage, and PadMapper and Zillow remained 5% apart at all times.
C) The pace of Apartment List’s gains was linear over the course of the 50 minutes.
D) The movement suddenly stopped at 11:30PM with Apartment List at a 3% lead, 30 minutes before voting officially closed.
E) A quick check on Apartment List’s Twitter and Facebook pages showed no activity in the last 6 hours. No promoting, no calls for votes, nothing.

The total rise from their previous days’ numbers represent a roughly 50% increase in the total number of votes over the number they received in the previous two weeks, despite having next to no social media buzz on the last day.

So here are some guesses at how this could have happened:

1) Lots of avid Apartment List fans suddenly discovered the contest in its final hour and voted at 2AM on the East Coast and 11PM on the West Coast on a Thursday night, at a constant linear pace. Then suddenly no more votes for the last half hour of the contest.
2) Lots of people halfway across the world where it was daytime suddenly discovered the contest in its final hour and voted, at a constant pace, for a website that only serves the US.
3) Someone created a bot that pre-registered for a bunch of fake Twitter accounts and used those to vote for Apartment List.
4) Someone did the human equivalent and used Mechanical Turk or another form of cheap labor to buy votes for an hour or two using fake accounts.

The first two don’t seem very likely.

Only the people at the Webby Awards have the voting logs, but based on the data points we showed above, our best estimate is that the voting distribution over time probably looked something like this (with minor fluctuations):

Sadly, the voting is over, and the results may be set the way they ended up above. We ate a too-early celebratory meal, then we prayed that we could still win, then it seems that a bot or something else came and bulldozed over us with a truckload of fake votes. It’s been an interesting exercise to study the voting pattern of this situation. Whereas most social network-driven activity probably builds in a Poisson-shaped distribution, the votes for Apartment List were added linearly, with a sudden halt at 11:30PM. We hope that the administrators of the Webby Awards will disqualify the almost certainly fake votes and we’ll regain first place, but we haven’t received a response from the admins about this yet.

What makes this whole voting mess more troubling to people who don’t give a fig about our winning an award is that decision-making is increasingly based on internet reviews or votes. The aggregate opinion of the masses is often viewed as more accurate or trustworthy than that of a single reviewer in a magazine, since we expect that we may have different preferences from a single reviewer, but if everyone likes something, we probably will too. This event shows that an aggregate opinion online may actually be easier to fake than a single detailed review. This other story posted less than a week ago about a man being duped by fake reviews for a moving company on Yelp demonstrates that this isn’t always so harmless.

We are left to ponder on the broader question of the pitfalls of Internet voting and the necessity of transparency in things involving voting. If the Webby Awards had not decided to hide the voting distribution in the last hours of voting, would the perpetrator have risked exposure and still pulled this off? Or would s/he have simply done it in a more subtle way?

As a final note, if you decide to write about this, please don’t link to Apartment List as a result of this post. This event shouldn’t lead to an SEO windfall.

UPDATE: Thanks to those of you who pointed me to a blog post from a few days ago by Apartment List – the explanation they provide is that they asked people not to confirm their email addresses after voting, and instead forward the confirmations to them so they could confirm them near the end. That would explain this strange voting pattern, but I’m skeptical, since their public voting campaigns didn’t mention anything about this convoluted step, and I think the number of people they would have had to get to do this privately would have needed to be very large. The Webby admins doubtless have a record of when the votes were originally cast, though, and if it is legitimate, it’s a pretty neat trick to avoid counter voting drives.

UPDATE #2: PadMapper won the Webby for best Real Estate site! Still no response from them about the People’s Voice side of things on whether they checked out the votes, though.

UPDATE #3: Thanks to commenter Mike, who dug up a contest they ran for votes in exchange for a chance to win an iPad. Not as shady as running a bot or hiring people directly, but still basically buying votes. It doesn’t seem to have been extremely successful, though (39 comments from people who voted), and their directions don’t mention not clicking the confirmation email, so I don’t think this explains the vote spike in the last two hours. It seems to have been taken down, which is a bit suspicious. Here’s the cached copy: Cached contest page