I need to find an apartment
I'm in the middle of an apartment search. I was reflecting the other day on how much searching for an apartment has changed over the last 10 years.<p>Conclusion: it hasn't changed much at all.<p>It's still necessary to search on a myriad of sites. Most of the time, by the time you inquire, a place is gone. Or the ad was misleading and that "$2000 2BR" is actually "$2000 for the cheapest Studio we have, but we also have 2BR for $3.5K".<p>Finding places that match my criteria still requires careful inspection of the description. Checking a filter box for "Parking" excludes places that only mention parking in the description.<p>With all of the modernization and streamlining that has happened in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful.<p>Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile, but these days, it seems like most listings are posted by scammy middlemen just trying to make a commission on the listing, and now the site actively makes the process even harder.<p>Is hunting for an apartment doomed to be this messy forever? It seems like an area that is ripe for disruption or a better option, but what would it take to actually solve this?<p>---<p>With all of that said, this post is exactly what I needed right now. I've been toying with a very similar idea to improve the efficiency of my search process and this is good inspiration.