the pursuit of techyness

On Finding a Place to Live.

PadMapper - Amazing.

I’ve been living my life in 6-month increments, mainly due to the fact that I’m in a rotational leadership program where I move every 6 months (call me crazy, I know.)

People are usually concerned for me- but the worst part of it is finding a cool place to live for 6 months in a short amount of time, within your price range.

So, my initial approach was somewhat similar to most- updating my facebook status, e-mailing contacts, and of course, checking Craigslist numerous times per day.

After the stress of excel to Craigslist copy and paste efforts, my lean/six sigma training kicked in: There has to be a better way to do this… Are there applications available that I just don’t know about or don’t have access to?

Well, I was right.

I found PadMapper… this would have seriously saved me HOURS. Basically, PadMapper pulls location data listed in craigslist, and displays it in (our favorite) google maps interface, where you can also FILTER LISTINGS based on bedrooms, # bathrooms, total price, and price per bedroom (great for roommates).

If you’re particularly interested in a place, you can zoom in very close, and nearby restaurants, bars, shopping and more will show up on the map (in most cities), and you can click on them to see their Yelp Ratings.

The only thing to watch out for is not PadMapper’s fault- but just the inconsistency of how data is entered into Craigslist. When posting an ad on CraigsList, some enter the “weekly” or “bi-weekly” rate instead of the monthly rate, and that can throw PadMapper off… so just keep an eye out for this. Now, this is an improvement CraigsList needs to change- simply adding a new field or a button to choose if it is a weekly/daily/monthly rate, which would allow for easier searching.

It really just boils down to their tagline- “Making Apartment Huting Suck Less.” basically.