What better way to find real estate than to look next to your favorite bars, cafes, and restaurants?

Heck, I’d pay foursquare to see those ads for the month or two I was looking for an apartment!

( I know it’s in French, but here’s the “tip” on foursquare for an apartment)

I never spent much time thinking about the apartment markets while I was in Houston, but my recent experience in New York City were so horrifying that I really felt something needed to be done.

Existing solutions seem to come from the mindset that they need to fight the system from within. They aim to undercut broker prices by being more efficient (see applying any technology what so-ever), or they just try targeting a larger market. One of the most recent examples can be found here… XXX has had a series of posts about Redfin, a relatively new low cost residential web-based real estate broker. Though it addresses the home buying market, I hope to see some of their practices carry over to the rental market.

After working with a couple brokers to find rentals in New York City I reallized that they are not evil people. They are working in a market with massive inequalities of information, and fairly low incentives to maintain high customer satisfaction. Especially in NYc with such high demand for housing, the renter is at a disadvantage. People will do anything to find a new place, and many of them coming into the city for the first time know absolutlely nothing about how the system works…. In the end this leads to over-priced apartments, rushed decisions, brokers gaming the system to close more deals, and very unhappy renters.

What I propose is a tool or portal to empower the buyers again. Something that can give them information they need to make smarter decisions and have a bit more power in their court for the negotiating. At the same time I see the same simple tool being applied to the brokers "to keep them honest".

The tools have been built before and the model is being tested by other companies, so its just a matter of piecing it together.

Phase 1: Empowering Buyers

While searching for my apartment in the city I noticed one thing really made my broker nervous. This cardinal sin was talking to other brokers and the other brokers clients (yes, I'm a chatty guy). The more I talked, the more I learned. Combined with some creative filtering of RSS feeds, and some shifty online research I was able to get a much better feel for the market.

In particular I searched craigslist and called a LOT of brokers. I developed a good system of questions to ask each broker, and lost any sense of common decency while on the phone, so i went right for the jugular. The point being, is that each person searching for an apartment is seeing the market from a different perspective and learns different things from that market. Should craigslist simply have had a way to post comments, things would have been much easier.

Enter my previous idea to use social bookmarking sites with comments as a way to "impose" comments on sites that don't have them. An added benefit is that these comments can reach across multipled information sources. You're not restricted to just craigslist or edgio. Any site that generates a static URL for the life of the post can be commented on through a service such as Diggo. If you have a site that was focused on real estate in a certain city, the bookmarks users create, could serve as a way to provide feedback on those posts. End-users searching for apartments could combine their knowledge to help offset the advantage brokers have.

Examples of social bookmarking sites that could be used:

• http://www.diggo.com
• www.shadows.com
• http://www.markaboo.com

None of them are setup to address this problem, and I would argue that the comments section on these services are very poorly designed. The point is, that with a little bit of code, you could come up with something very similar that would work.

With enough people loading tips and tricks, while posting "the reality" behind many of these online postsings, empowered users will be able to gain a better negotiating position.

Phase 2: Punishing the violators

The other side of this problem is that with the continual influx of renters in NYC coming from all across the world brokers have a fresh supply of new suckers. To be able to provide some continuity between the renter, we need to have a place for them to leave feedback or rate their experiences with different brokers. The biggest issues I see are making sure people are who they say they are, so they can be held accountable for their feedback. This is an area where I have very little experience, but I've found a couple of other sites that are working to solve this problem.

Websites that have buyer/seller rating systems:

• http://www.rapleaf.com/ – a real-estate site may be able to leverage rapleaf rather than re-inventing the wheel
• http://panjiva.com/
• http://www.homethinking.com/

To summarize my very "on the back of a napkin" idea, I see a sight that serves as a portal for the new york city apartment rental market. It is a one of a kind market, so it deserves its own community site. A social bookmarking feature with bookmark comments would provide a way for users to exchange information about apartment listings across all services. At the same time some sort of buyer/seller reputation ranking service would help renters get a better feel for which brokers to work with. Combine with some mildly decent content you could really provide some value in this space. As far as i can tell there aren't many people even providing tips or tricks much less full on tools to help these renters out (i'll eventually be posting some articles about this at www.scoutsider.com).

1) Copy the link of the apartment listing that is in question into the body of the e-mail, and populate the subject with any distinguishing information you have about the apartment. I also tried to get the brokers name and number somewhere in the e-mail. E-mail this information to yourself.

Initial entry screenshot

2) I typically setup some filters in my gmail account to automatically label all my emails with “nycAPT” in the subject with the same label, so that I could just click on that label to access all of the properties that I was currently researching.

3) Any follow up information you learn during subsequent calls or e-mails, you can just hit reply to your first message, add the notes to the body, and gmail threads the messages together for you.

Follow up Notes

4) Anytime you wanted to share this information with your roommates, or collaborate with them on obtaining information about properties from the broker, you could just add their e-mail to the list, and remember to hit “Reply All” on all subsequent emails and notes. Now they are fully “integrated” into your CRM.

Collaboration Features

5) The best part of this whole process, is its not portable, and you can access it from anywhere through gmail mobile. With the ability to add data and retrieve data from anywhere, you end up with a system flexible and rugged enough to make it through the NYC apartment search.

On the go!

In my previous post about BLAGs, I had thought the best way to collaboratively discuss links and articles would be through taking all your bookmarks and feeding the into a blog, where you could post comments.

Diigo took one of many attempts at the social bookmarking phenomenon and succeeds at creating an intuitive interface for facilitating conversations through social bookmarks. The commenting engine is quite fun, and unlike Shadows (a seemingly more sophisticated and complicated site), where I couldn’t figure out how to find my friends, I was able to connect to them quite quickly for fun multiperson dialogues. I had previously taken a quick look at Shadows for its “shadow pages” and commenting, but it really left something to be desired. Diigo then came in and hit the spot, though all of these services are blurring together.

I also stumbled across a very useful application for this software. I’ve been in the midst of a very difficult apartment search, and I realized that Diigo could provide a way for me to take notes (and share these notes with my roommates) across multiple listing platforms (Craigslist, Citicribs, or directly on the landlord’s site). I could envision empowering all the apartment searchers across the city to provide feedback, share tips, and fight back against the brokers that have a monopoly on all of the information.

See pictures here.

I didn’t stress test this apartment search information tracking application too much because I stumbled across a more elegant solution soon there after. In the meantime I will continue to poke around with Diigo, and maybe I can finally get away from Del.icio.us, which has been driving me crazy with its extremely slow searching.

Metro NYC: Getting off Craig's list

Watch out when you're looking for an apartment to rent on craigslist.  Brokers, not normally a very technically savvy crowd, are starting to figure out how to game the system. Though the methods aren't very sohpisticated and in the long run it probably won't do them much good, the "bait and switch" can be a royal waste of time. Give it a look, and share your experiences! Mine are soon to come.

Here are some more articles about the topic:

- Craigslist starts charging for real estate postings

- The value? of an apartment broker

- Craig himself on charging for real estate postings

To start, lets outline the previous system. The tools used where the following:

- Craiglist (there is a ton of turn over, and a large volume of rentals go through this site)
- Housing Maps (craigslist/google maps mashup)
- Google Maps
- Gmail (e-mail was the preferred method of “first contact” for most posters)
- Pen and paper (to take notes on each of the properties)

The problems with the first system:

1) If you use a “craiglist” e-mail to contact someone, and they reply with their personal e-mail address, then you have no idea who that person is or which craigslist apartment posting they correspond with.
2) Craigslist is not searchable by specific geographic location (until the Housing maps mashup came along), and it also does not require posters to be all that precise (as in address) in their location.
3) Craiglist also does not include a field for people to elaborate on the length of the apartment rental. Even if you manage to narrow down a list of apartments in the right area its quite possible that they are only renting a room at $1000 per week for 2 weeks. Convenient.
4) The Housing Maps site does not seem to have as many posts as craigslist does. I have not been able to research where it draws its data from, but I’m assuming its only from posts that provide exact addresses.
5) There is no place within this system of apps to store the meta-data you collect from each apartment poster, through e-mail or phone calls.

The conclusion I came to after a couple days of using this system is that it’s all about the numbers. For you to get a decent amount of contacts that meet your criteria you really have to send out e-mails en-mass. Though this is horribly inefficient for you from a tracking perspective and for the apartment posters to get back to all the people inquiring, it was the only way to be sure that I was getting a steady source of apartments to go visit.

The solution(s) I found along the way:

1) I made sure to reference the post on craigslist that I was inquiring about, and to include the link to that post in the e-mail. Chance are that they were just going to hit reply, and I could find the corresponding post there within. I did run into some formatting issues with gmail, which caused me to loose those links. No explanation was found

This means that I’m heading into my second encounter without having made many improvements on my system. My blood pressure can not handle a repeat of the “all out e-mail and google maps bonanza” that was coupled with sprinting across the city using subways and buses to try to be the first person to a particular apartment.

My system needs to be efficient (relatively quick to enter data) and mobile, with all meta-data stored in one location. To a certain extent, if it tied into my Treo, that would be great. When I’m “out in the field” chasing apartments and I get calls from posters, it would be nice to know which post they corresponded with. One last requirement, is that its fairly accessible over the web. I am going to have roommates, and it would be good to collaborate in this process.

I welcome any feedback, tips, prayers in the meantime.

Apps that might be able to make this an easier process:

- frappr or flagr for mapping?
- Dabbledb , or some other web-based spreadsheet/database for tracking metadata
- dokuwiki for tracking notes, and maybe even pics ?