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.Conclusion: it hasn't changed much at all.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".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.With all of the modernization and streamlining that has happened in other parts of our lives, apartment hunting remains unstructured, messy, frustrating, stressful.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.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?---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.