There’s really nothing different about PadMapper today than there was yesterday, but today I decided that PadMapper had reached the threshold of being good enough to use, so I told lots of people about it, and I guess that’s what a launch is.
Because of the “launch”, I got a lot of great suggestions. Here are a few that kept coming up:
- Make the filter box smaller (it’s too big on a lot of screens) – Right now I’m looking into ways of doing this without making it less functional. I’m going to try to make a bottom-bar version, which several people suggested. Hopefully I’ll have this one remedied soon. Until then, use the little arrow buttons to shrink the box when not messing with the filters.
- Add the ability for users to post their own listings – I’ve been planning this one for a while, but I’m waiting until there’s enough traffic so that people who post will get some bites. It would suck to go through the trouble of coming up with a witty description and then not have anyone email you to compliment you on it.
- Add Other Filters (bathrooms, etc)Â – I’m currently working on this… bathrooms first. I don’t know how good the results will be, since Craigslist doesn’t have any sort of requirement for bathrooms to be listed, but if you know how many bathrooms you want, it should cut out most of the listings that don’t list it.
- Extend the subway filter to driving distance filter – I think this would be amazing, but it’s much harder, and I’m going to wait until I have a big chunk of time to mess with it, and I’ve taken care of some of the basics.
I’ll try to get these into PadMapper pretty soon, especially fixing the box and adding the bathroom filter.
Nice. Just curious, can you post a comparison of Padmapper and HousingMaps?
Also, a suggestion about features: one problem in NY is that posts that include a price invariably have different meanings, e.g. price/day, price/week, price/month, no-fee or with-fee, price/room (in multi-bedroom appts). This is a bit of a mess. Do you parse those and somehow attempt to normalize to price/month?
In any case, great work. Thanks!
Hey Martin. Great comment, thanks.
You’re right about the term/price problem, which is especially a problem with sublets. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to parse the term of a sublet reliably, since Craigslist has no real structure for that data, and there’s no real uniform language for describing the term. I’ll give it a try when I get some free time.
Fortunately, I don’t think it’s a very large percentage of sublets that have non-month prices, and those that do are usually suspiciously low when you look at them as being monthly prices (no way you’d get a 1BR in SoHo for 200-300/month, for example). I’d encourage people to flag this by clicking the “Something’s Wrong Here” link in the listing, since they are a bit confusing and don’t quite mesh with everything else.
On the other hand, I have been thinking about trying to work the broker fee into the overall price. Unfortunately, it can vary between 8 and 15%, which can make a large difference. I’m waiting until I have better data to do this.
For most things, I think it’s better for me to do nothing than to add something that’s very frequently inaccurate.
As for a HousingMaps vs. PadMapper comparison, I’d say that the biggest thing that HousingMaps has that PadMapper doesn’t is a list view of all the places on the map. Some people miss this, since it’s a good way to get a quick overview of what’s there, and it’s pretty standard on most real estate sites. Early on I decided that I didn’t really want a list because it takes up map space, and when I was using the list view, I’d almost always find something in the list that had a decent price, only to find that it was in an area I didn’t want. With PadMapper, I think it’s easier to set the fiilters to find only the places you would have clicked on in the list (mainly based on price), and then browse the areas you like. You can’t really do that with HousingMaps because the price filters suck, so you need the list.
That, along with the fact that HousingMaps had very few places listed, was why I made the thing that eventually became this while my roommates and I were searching for a place.
But the best comparison is trying both for yourself. HousingMaps is more responsive than PadMapper as well, since it uses static sets of points, whereas PadMapper is completely dynamic. If HousingMaps gets the job done for you, it might be a better user experience overall. If not, give PadMapper a try.
Oh yeah, if the inconsistency in terms is really bothersome, you can eliminate it by unchecking the “show sublets” checkbox at the bottom of the filters box.