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!
News
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
Make PadMapper a Desktop App and Save Time with your Apartment Hunt
PadMapper user @silentverbosity came up with a great idea and shared it on Twitter – make PadMapper into a desktop style app using Prism from Mozilla (a nifty program that runs a website from the desktop in a browser without the navigation bar, etc). You can find that here: http://prism.mozillalabs.com
Chrome users can do this as well (PC version only as of now), but from within Chrome. To do this, simply go to one of the menus in the upper right, click, select “Create Application Shortcut”, and follow the prompts. Here’s a video describing the process (skip to the last half) : http://vimeo.com/9661852
This should help save time if you use PadMapper a lot, and it should also let you have more map space, as the navigation bar, etc. won’t be using space anymore.
Anyone else have any helpful tips?
Comparison Pricing
If you’ve been using PadMapper today, you may have noticed that there is now an additional piece of info in each bubble: how much more or less expensive that place is than the median xyz BR in the area.
It doesn’t necessarily work very well in sparse areas, so take it with a grain of salt, but it should give you a rough idea of how good a deal a place is (and if it’s 95% less than the median, there’s probably something suspect about the place, or my comparison algorithm is having a brainfart).
If you see too many algorithm brainfarts, please let know at padmapper@gmail.com. Happy hunting!
PadMapper iPhone App V2.0 – Mobile Apartment Search, Now With Mapping
After a bit of wrestling with the iPhone’s SDK, and an unexpectedly short review period by Apple (way to finally step it up guys), the iPhone version of PadMapper.com is now substantially different (and better, I hope).
If you don’t want to read my ramblings below, and instead want to try it out straightaway, go here to download PadMapper Apartment Search for the iPhone (warning, iTunes link).
Moving on. For those of you who never used the first version of the iPhone app, it was basically a very simple tool for checking out what was available around you, and helping you get in contact with them. It worked pretty well for what it was meant to do, but users complained that it was missing features. I contended that it did what it needed to, and that the rest of the time could be spent on a proper computer, but I’m not the one whose opinion matters in these things.
So there’s this new version, and I think the users were right. This version is the old version plus a mobile replacement for the PadMapper website, and lets you search anywhere that PadMapper.com lets you search, instead of just around you. It’s pretty sweet. And now it’s free!
A few protips:
- The apartment search is centered around a given point marked by the green pin. You set the green pin by either hitting the “Here” button (centers around your current location), or entering an address, city, or zip code in the search box and hitting search.
- You can reset the search area to some arbitrary place by holding and dragging the green pin to a new location.
- The filters will help you get rid of the crap you don’t want. Especially useful is making sure you only get things with phone numbers, so you can schedule appointments immediately.
- The “map” button on the full listing screen takes you to the Google maps application rather than to the pin on the map. You can use to get directions to the place.
- The list is ordered by distance from the green pin location. This is especially useful if the green pin is where you are, you’re on foot, and don’t want to travel far.
That’s all I’ve got for now, comment if you have any questions that you want answered. And go download it! It’s free, and it’ll make your apartment search suck less.