There are a couple new sources up for folks not in the US. I heard a lot of Canadians asking for Kijiji, so Kijiji.ca listings are now up in Canada. Basically the same story for Gumtree in the UK. Enjoy!
Archives for April 2010
Yelp Listings
If you zoom in real close on NYC, SF, or one of a few other cities, you can see the locations of various restaurants, bars, gyms, museums, and generally entertaining places marked around the map. Click on these and you’ll get a link to their Yelp reviews!
It only shows places rated 4 stars or higher, since the idea is that you only really care about the exceptional places located near an apartment. There are going to be pizza places everywhere, but having the best pizza shop in NYC located in the ground floor of your building could completely make that place for you while you live there. (Or it could make it seriously annoying to get into the building through the inevitably long line :-))
This is actually a somewhat old feature that I removed a while back due to it seemingly annoying people more than it helped them, but I’ve tweaked it a bit so it should be less annoying. My apologies for the somewhat stale data, it was collected when I first rolled the feature out. If there’s sufficient interest in the feature, I’ll try to get updated data and roll it out for more cities.
Amazing PadMapper Tutorial Video
A PadMapper user who is in the midst of an apartment hunt made a great tutorial screencast about how to use the major features of PadMapper. It serves as an excellent tutorial overview of the major features of PadMapper, ranging from the filters to saving favorites to setting up email alerts. I would highly recommend giving it a watch.
A couple more pro tips…
If you want to set up multiple email alerts, you can enter your email address with a + after the first part with a tag, since PadMapper will replace any alerts with the same exact email address (perhaps this should be changed). So, if your email address is george@gmail.com, you could enter george+cheapapts@gmail.com and sign up for another alert with george+dogfriendlyapts@gmail.com.
Another pro tip: zooming in more will load more apartments (older listings, the newest are always visible from high up). Zooming way in in a few major cities will reveal the locations of top-rated Yelp-reviewed restaurants, bars, gyms, etc.
Final tip: If you’ve got a place to list on Craigslist, list your apartment on PadLister, and that will let you automatically create a pretty, formatted listing for Craigslist maps and pictures, as well as share it on Twitter, Facebook, and your own website via a free widget. Just as PadMapper makes apartment hunting suck less, PadLister makes trying to get your apartment rented out via Craigslist suck less. It’s basically a big toolbox for that.
Thanks very much to the creator of the video – I hope it helps many people – and happy apartment hunting, everyone. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, please email them to padmapper@gmail.com