In the good ol’ days, whatever they were, it used to be you had to look at listings in the back of a newspaper or drive around searching for signs just like the one above to find a good apartment. If you wanted to move a great distance, this complicated matters as you had to investigate properties sight unseen. This is no longer the case, and we’ve got the 3 best apartment search tools for finding the perfect one for you.
# 1: Padmapper For Apartment Searches
How does Padmapper make finding the perfect apartment or house easier for you? Simple.
Pop in your needs, wants, budget and other concerns for a place. Tadaaaa. And Padmapper will give you a list of places in the given areas you specify, just like that. You can then further streamline things by adding listings to your Favorites list or hiding from the map. This makes finding a new home or apartment as easy as a few clicks of your mouse.
#2: My Apartment Map
Myapartmentmap is a really great tool that offers a lot of different options. Once you do narrow down places, you can go right to Google Streetview and have a walk around your prospective neighborhood. You can look up all sorts of things in the area. Where as rental data is a common offering of sites like this, Myapartmentmap also offers users the ability to look up nearby social scenes and local businesses.
#3: Hotpads
Hotpads is an interesting apartment search because it also offers you something called “heat maps”. What this is, is the ability to overlap searches by certain criteria. So, say you’re looking for a nice little 4 bedroom that allows dogs and cats, but there are certain things you don’t want- you can add that in. Or there are certain things you do want. You can put in data like median age, rent, foreclosure data, household income, population density, and this search overlays your existing location search to come up with a more clear picture of your prospective neighborhoods.
Conclusion
Moving can be really stressful but in recent years, technology has made it a lot less stressful. Any given apartment search you run, there’s a good chance you can use Google Maps Streetview to take a virtual walk around the neighborhood, rather than driving all the way there. You can have full listings of any apartments or homes in the neighborhoods you want, and maybe even find that neighborhoods you didn’t think would be ideal actually are. (Or vice versa.) Before you know it, you’ll be paying your first rent in your new place. Happy home hunting!
[…] in the paper, but the safest bet is to use Craigslist, Trulia, or Zillow and there are so many tools out there that can help make it […]