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"Where do you go when you have an apartment you need to fill?  Craigslist, of course.  But as most people will agree, using Craigslist can be a painful experience.  Very basic, filled with spam, and often times listings that have only text.  \nWe've see multiple alternatives to Craigslist apartment and rental listings, but RentHop, a YCombinator-funded company, caught our interest because of its utilization of Google Maps, shopping carts, and automatically-generated itineraries.  It's what we wish Craigslist actually offered as features.\nAn Overview of RentHop\nRentHop makes it easy to both add a listing and search for one.  If you're an apartment-seeker, you can do a standard search that filters results by apartment type, number of bedrooms, neighborhood, rent, and other factors.  As you filter, a Google Map adjusts to show you only the apartments you're looking for and lists them all out on the left-hand side.  \nTwo features that really stand out though:\n\n1. Selecting Map Areas: Instead of just specifying neighborhoods, you can literally draw a box or a triangle on the map and only see listings in that geographic area.\n2. Creating Schedules: Add aparments to your favorite lists and soon you have an itinerary for comparing listings, complete with contact info, images, and address.  This is incredible if you need to visit 4 or 5 listings in a row.\n\n\n\n\n\nAdding a listing is painless as well - just one page where you add photos, contact info, apartment details, and a description.  This makes it easy on the time-crunched landlord or the guy who needs to find a subletter.\nIn the end, success in this market is all about scale and how many people are using your service.  If you don't have people posting listings and users seeking apartments on your product, nobody will use it, no matter how good it is.  \nHowever, RentHop has shown strong traction in New York, the only market in which it is available for now.  Yet it has thousands of listings and already is profitable from NYC alone.  As it expands, we think that RentHop has a chance to make a dent into Craigslist, and look forward to having it available in more cities soon.\nSee Also: Apartment Hunting: 50+ Tools for Renters &amp; Landlords"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/renthop/>