A Better Apartment Search for Israel

Why is it that with such an advanced tech sector, the Israeli consumer web industry is so underdeveloped?

Every time I go to one of the Israeli classifieds/apartment listing sites, I’m always shocked by how horribly unusable they are. You always hear that “location, location, location,” is the most important factor when considering where to live, and it’s even more true in Tel Aviv than anywhere else… There are a couple of major listing sites (Homeless, Yad2, WinWin) and even one aggregator, Zeh V’Zeh. Zeh V’Zeh is the best one and most usable, but still doesn’t provide any sort of useful API, or even an RSS feed… Even map search is hard to come by, with the most notable Kan Garim being pretty poorly executed.

Basic things to look for:

• Better quality data
• Search results on a map
• Easy way to filter/update results (think kayak.com)

I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot lately, and it seems that the biggest issue is data quality. After all, what use is a blurry picture of the bathroom sink?

This warrants some further investigation…