News

After 3 years, we settled our lawsuit with craigslist today. As part of the settlement, we’ll no longer be including craigslist users’ listings in our search results.

However, PadMapper is not going anywhere, and we’re excited about what we have in store. PadMapper has over 100 sources of listing data, and over 700,000 non-craigslist listings on our map at any given time, representing many millions of apartment units. PadMapper will continue to help our many millions of users find a place to live every month.

In the past year, our team has grown quickly, and in the coming months we’re preparing to release a large update for our Android app, followed by a revised iOS app and a fresh look-and-feel for PadMapper.com.

If you are an owner or property manager, we’ve made it easy to post your listing directly to PadMapper. It’s free and can be renewed after 30 days.

We’d like to give a big thank you to all who have supported our legal battle – 3taps, Greg Kidd, Focal Law, the EFF, and the thousands of you who wrote letters of support.

We still wake up every morning excited to make apartment hunting suck less.

Onward!
Eric and the PadMappers

Hey! This is my first post on the PadMapper Blog as our Business Development Manager. I joined PadMapper nine weeks ago to build out and maintain our relationships between PadMapper and all of the property managers, software vendors, and other teams that work with us!

In the past month, I’ve been working on building out new integrations between us and different property management software companies, and I’m happy to announce that we’re adding three new integrations, with three more in the works.

Here’s the new partnerships:

Yardi – one of the largest rental software companies out there. If you’re using Yardi Voyager, you can seamlessly publish your apartments to PadMapper via RentCafe. Just hop into your control panel to enable PadMapper!

RealBird – The RealBird Listing Publisher is an easy-to-use and powerful online, social media and mobile listing marketing platform. If you’re using RealBird, there’s nothing else you need to do — your listings are already on PadMapper!

Onsite Property Manager – Affordable, professional rental property management software that increases income, improves efficiency, and fills vacancies faster. Anyone using Onsite should already have their listings on PadMapper!

We’re also working hard to add more integrations every month. Coming up next, you can expect to see us integrate with MRI Software, RealPage, and HeroPM!

Let us know what you think! Feel free to email me if you’d like to integrate with us, or request an integration with your software provider.

Here at PadMapper, our servers automatically screen emails that go through PadLister, to monitor for scams, and ban listers who send scammy emails. Before we ban them, though, we have to review them by hand to make sure we don’t ban a legitimate person by accident. Because of this, we get to see a lot of pretty fun emails from various scammers, like this gem, from a “Robotic Programmer&Welder/Fitter” who is looking for a tenant who is a “clean freak and does not tolerate anything that has to do with dirty”.

We are pleased that you have an interest in our house, Our lovely home is
still available for lease and we want responsible adults/family who are neat and also believe that they have what it takes to take care of our house as if it were theirs. My wife and I initially had it up for sale but had a change of mind in leasing it out ourselves because the agent that was in charge of our rental property was asking too much of an agent fee and also making it difficult for people who cannot afford the rent, stay away from renting my house.

The reason why our house is up for lease is because I got transferred
from my place of work to Texas, I will be away with my family for at least 4 years because of the love I have for them, I have decided not to sell our house and also assuring them that we only have few years to spend here and will be willing to lease it out to person/family who is willing to assure us of taking absolute care of our home and pay their rent on time. I will start by telling you more in regards me and my family. I have a daughter named Leslie (20yrs) who attends University of Texas as a medical student, she has a lot going for her and she is also down to earth in all that she does to keep us happy and when she is back home on vacation, she also assist her mom in the house work when am at work. I work as a Robotic Programmer & Welder/Fitter here in Texas and got married to a lovely wife who is a member of Joyce Meyer Ministries. We will be very pleased if we can find the right tenant to rent our home, a person who is a clean freak and does not tolerate anything that has to do with dirty… We also would like to know more about you and your family, your renting experience and how long and when you plan moving into our home.

We see a lot of emails that look almost exactly like this, with some minor variations. The big giveaway, besides the long rambling story meant to make you trust them, is that they tell you that they’ve been transferred, which means that they’re not around to show you the house. If you see that in an email, that’s almost always a dead giveaway that it’s a scam. In the next email, if you respond, they’ll ask you to send them money, in exchange for sending the keys, often through some service that they try to pass off as a reputable source. They’ll even offer you a substantial discount (30%) if you pay for 3 or 6 months up front. Sounds like a great deal, but in reality, you don’t get anything out of it except a lighter bank account.

As a rule of thumb, you should never put down money to rent a place without seeing the inside of it first – if you live far away from the place you’re moving to, it’s almost always worth it to rent a place on Airbnb for a week to live in while you tour around and pick a longer term place to live.

Happy hunting!
Eric

Well, I did it. I finally got around to rewriting PadMapper in a newer version of Google Maps.

I’m probably one of the last developers on the planet to upgrade to Google Maps v3. Why? Well, I really, really liked Google Maps v2. That, and I wrote more extensive v2 code than most, and many of the features I had been using weren’t added to v3 immediately (or at all, in some cases) so upgrading was particularly daunting for me.

But that’s why a lot of the visual styling just changed. Also, if there are any bugs that have cropped up, please let me know! (padmapper@gmail.com).

The upgrade brings with it some neat features and refinements that I found time to toss in, or that v3 offered.

First, I could finally add the official Google mass transit overlay, which is a lot cleaner/neater than my old one. If you ever used it, you know that mine looked like a kid drew it with crayons on top of a nice Google map.

Second, for those of you with car storage anxiety, I added the ability to overlay parking lots on the map, which you should be able to call up and ask about rates by using the linked Yelp pages.

Third, there’s the elevation/terrain map in the upper right corner.

And finally, My Places now includes four transit types: Mass Transit (new!), Bicycling (redone to be more accurate), Driving, and Walking. This should help people like me who don’t really like dealing with having a car get a sense of how far things actually are.

Hope you guys like the changes!

Happy hunting!
Eric

Craigslist has decided to make it impossible for the PadMapper bar to function with their listings, so now, those listings won’t have the PadMapper bar on them. Sorry everyone. If you want a consistent experience, you can filter out Craigslist listings by clicking Show More Filters and looking to the bottom to see the source filters.

Every so often, I get requests from researchers for rental data/statistics to analyze, and they frequently yield some interesting papers and visualizations.

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