Renters vs. Rental Ads

After moving almost every year since I moved to college, I think I’ve got a pretty firm handle on what’s important when finding looking for an apartment. Every time I start looking (or friends, for that matter), I’m taken aback by how much drivel you have to sift through in order to find useful information. Consider the following question:

Where can I live that’s within 15 minutes walking distance to my office at Union Square?

Here are my options for finding an answer:

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Now I have to go through every post one by one and determine if the information, vague as it often is, is enticing enough to actually call or email the poster and inquire further. Repeat this hundreds of times and it becomes tedious and extremely time consuming. There are some sites that help you by sticking said posts on a map, which is already infinitely more useful than the above. But, there’s still the problem of the underlying data being too vague, inaccurate or just plain scammy. Plus, plotting “Midtown” on a map just isn’t that useful to someone who has been in New York for more than 20 minutes.

The old real estate addage is “location, location, location,” so why don’t any rental sites actually let you search by location effectively? Quite puzzling. Instead, I’m presented with headlines like this, which tell me nothing about location, much less anything else:

$1350 / 2br - Great Space Close to All

Date: 2011-11-23, 5:44AM EST
Reply to: see below [Errors when replying to ads?]

2 separate bedrooms
Full living room
Full Bath Call now 347 XXX XXXX

While there have been numerous attempts to make the process easier, it’s still fascinating that the most useful tools like HousingMaps and Nestio still rely on the same unreliable data that powers Craigslist.

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Once you move out of an insane rental market like New York, your options might be simpler, however. Any search for “chicago apartments” or similar will likely turn up results from rent.com, apartments.com and the like, which over the past decade or so have proven themselves to be masters of search engine marketing, both paid and organic. This becomes obvious from the moment you land, as you’re greeted with keyword-stuffed pages with thousdands of internal links and generic marketing descriptions that could simultaneously be apropriate for every single apartment complex in the world, and none at all. Consider the following example:

Del Prado: One of Hyde Parks’ oldest, largest and most fashionable 1920’s apartment hotels has been restored and reinvented as state-of-the-art apartments with open floorplans, high-end finishes and view of the entire city. With a lavish grand lobby that spotlights the original Beaux Arts and Art Deco architectural details, these modern luxury apartment are encased within the classic elegance of the by-gone era. Rich in history and character, to experience Del Prado is to explore a new frontier of modern living.

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I don’t want to “explore a new frontier of modern living.” I just want a clean, quiet place that’s reasonably priced and convenient to where I need to be.

In short, just tell me: where, how much, and when. And show me with pictures.