Unfortunately this is of no help to me. Here in Geneva, Switzerland, the problem is not choosing the apartment, but being chosen among all the other people who want the same apartment you do. I've seen people stand in line just to visit one apartment. I hear there are even worse places than Geneva for finding an apartment.<p>Businesses have sprang up to help people find apartments, so it is possible to outsource your apartment hunt too, but it costs much more than 90$.
I sort of watched over his shoulder as he went through this process and it was quite amazing to observe. The guy he ended up working with, for $3 an hour, was quite sharp and motivated. When you think of the 30 hours he saved and the fact that you spend $1000+ on an apartment, the $90 spent is absolutely nothing.
I'm a bit surprised that there seem to be no good apartment search websites. Has this something to do with the larger home ownership? Or is it an artifact of the larger area of the US?<p>In Germany there is for instance <a href="http://www.immobilienscout24.de" rel="nofollow">http://www.immobilienscout24.de</a> and some more websites like it (although the same offers end up on nearly every one of them). The search options there are more finely tuned than on lets say <a href="http://www.apartments.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.apartments.com</a>. Also the larger newspapers (for instance <a href="http://immobilienmarkt.sueddeutsche.de/" rel="nofollow">http://immobilienmarkt.sueddeutsche.de/</a>) have often own search engines for places to rent or buy.
Sorry if this sounds trollish, but Shahan was doing "jobs Americans don't want to do."<p>Not only is this a good idea online, you can also hire domestic (local) concierge services to run errands for you during the day. My mother-in-law successfully runs such a business.
For comedy value, there should be a follow-up article involving the "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist.<p>2600 magazine recently had an article about a Bayesian filter for getting the spam out of the "w4m" section. A human could weed out rejections, spambots, and prostitutes, putting the rest into a sortable spreadsheet.
<i>I wanted a place that has an outdoor space (a yard, a porch, a balcony, or a deck), hardwood floors, laundry (in unit, in building, or close by), a very specific location (to balance three commutes), lots of light, and all of the typical apartment requirements (right size, budget, start date, etc). This was clearly the job for a human,</i><p>Er, no, this is clearly a job for a real-estate-specific website with a search form. The part that only a human can do is to actually visit the apartments but you can't outsource that, at least not to a remote person.<p>Now, why in the world do people use craigslist by default instead of a better website? It should be beneficial to tenants -- who will save time and money -- and to landlords and agencies, who will gladly pay a fee to list their properties.
It sounds like a good idea, and something I might try in future apartment searches because in previous jobs it has always taken quite some time to find a desirable place to live.<p>However, there are some niggles at the back of my mind - or perhaps a little Stallman on my shoulder. Translated into UK pounds $3 per hour would certainly be below minimum wage. Is it really a good idea to encourage people to lock themselves into poverty wages? If I can satisfy myself that I'm not actually creating more poverty then perhaps this strategy is worth trying.
Shouldn't this be the job of a real estate agency? You ask them to find an apartment matching your criteria and they find it (in their database with the current offers).
Just thought I'd mention a project I've been working on related to this thread called MapThatPad (<a href="http://www.mapthatpad.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapthatpad.com</a>) that helps you save apartments you find and stay organized while you hunt. Helped me quite a bit when I was looking with my girlfriend.<p>Having been in the same boat many times, I got tired of spreadsheets and hacked up this site. Would love any feedback or comments.
I'm actually quite interested to see a discourse on the impacts that these sort of ultra low-priced outsourced products have had on concierge and virtual assistant services in small town USA.<p>Sort of along the same vein of how designers formed an ad hoc association of how they felt regarding spec-work and design centric crowdsourcing sites like 99designs.<p>Does anyone have any articles on this?
I'd happily pay for this sort of service, but but don't want to deal with the overhead of having to post on odesk and pick someone suitable (plus the hassle if they're not very good at it). It would be good if there was a more specialist online marketplace for this sort of task which reduce those overheads.
I was very close to trying this for a recent apartment search, but I finally landed a place just before I crossed the threshold. I spent quite a bit more than 30 hours cumulatively, though, so I could have saved a lot of time for more productive tasks.
Anyone going to systematize this and create a curated list of vetted apartments for a fee? Maybe something like $9 for a month of access to one geographic area.