It doesn’t necessarily work very well in sparse areas, so take it with a grain of salt, but it should give you a rough idea of how good a deal a place is (and if it’s 95% less than the median, there’s probably something suspect about the place, or my comparison algorithm is having a brainfart).

If you see too many algorithm brainfarts, please let know at padmapper@gmail.com. Happy hunting!

Map View with Apartments as Red Pins

After a bit of wrestling with the iPhone’s SDK, and an unexpectedly short review period by Apple (way to finally step it up guys), the iPhone version of PadMapper.com is now substantially different (and better, I hope).

If you don’t want to read my ramblings below, and instead want to try it out straightaway, go here to download PadMapper Apartment Search for the iPhone (warning, iTunes link).

Moving on. For those of you who never used the first version of the iPhone app, it was basically a very simple tool for checking out what was available around you, and helping you get in contact with them. It worked pretty well for what it was meant to do, but users complained that it was missing features. I contended that it did what it needed to, and that the rest of the time could be spent on a proper computer, but I’m not the one whose opinion matters in these things.

So there’s this new version, and I think the users were right. This version is the old version plus a mobile replacement for the PadMapper website, and lets you search anywhere that PadMapper.com lets you search, instead of just around you. It’s pretty sweet. And now it’s free!

A few protips:

• The apartment search is centered around a given point marked by the green pin. You set the green pin by either hitting the “Here” button (centers around your current location), or entering an address, city, or zip code in the search box and hitting search.
• You can reset the search area to some arbitrary place by holding and dragging the green pin to a new location.
• The filters will help you get rid of the crap you don’t want. Especially useful is making sure you only get things with phone numbers, so you can schedule appointments immediately.
• The “map” button on the full listing screen takes you to the Google maps application rather than to the pin on the map. You can use to get directions to the place.
• The list is ordered by distance from the green pin location. This is especially useful if the green pin is where you are, you’re on foot, and don’t want to travel far.

That’s all I’ve got for now, comment if you have any questions that you want answered. And go download it! It’s free, and it’ll make your apartment search suck less.

You might notice that you sometimes can’t see all of the favorites at a given time, even though the area it’s on is showing on the map. This has to do with the limited number of markers PadMapper can show at once. To see that marker, either zoom in on that point, or filter out non-favorites.

Hope the new features help. If you notice that something isn’t working right, or even if it just seems awry, please send email to padmapper@gmail.com.

With that option, you’ll get one big email sometime in the afternoon, rather than up to 24 small ones, over the course of the day.

Hope that helps. As always, if you have any feedback, please send it to padmapper@gmail.com.

Walk Score is a neat service from the good folks at Front Seat that summarizes how walkable a location is, and lets you see how far you need to travel from a location to meet various needs (groceries, gyms, restaurants, etc). From that, it gives you a score from 0-100 that summarizes how feasible it is to access everything on foot from there. If you don’t plan on having a car, you probably don’t want to live in a place that scores a 20…

When you click a Walk Score link, the bubble info will be replaced by a mini map and a browseable list of points of interest that highlights the location of those POIs on the map, along with the walkability score of that location.

Please let me know if you find this helpful, and what refinements you might find helpful. I’m planning on adding some other things with Walk Score, so any input is helpful. Send feedback to padmapper@gmail.com

Thanks everyone, and happy hunting.

You can actually access it by dragging the map on PadMapper.com over to the UK as well, or just typing in “London” or similar into the hop somewhere box, but PadMapper.co.uk does a bit of internationalization. Also, some of the filtering options are missing for pragmatic reasons, hopefully I’ll have cause to bring them to the UK version as well, once I find data sources that distinguish on those things.

It’s a bit of a soft-launch, and any feedback would be appreciated, as I’m sure there are issues to be worked out, and lots of improvements to be made. Please send those to padmapper@gmail.com.

Thanks everyone, happy flat hunting, and don’t forget to tell your British friends!

Persistent PadMapper: About a week ago, I added persistence to the state of PadMapper, which meant that if you left the page and then came back, it would look the way it did when you left, filters and all. However, due to the way it was done, it would go back to blank once you quit your browser (or let too much time pass). I’ve fixed this, so the state of everything (favorites list, grayed markers, filter settings) should last about 30 days, or until you clear your cookies, whichever comes first. Cookies are required in order for this to work.

Linking to the current view/filters, Embeddable PadMapper: There is now a “Link/Embed” link in the link bar. If you select it, it will present you with a link that will bring your friends to the current view of PadMapper (including the current filter settings). This is great for coordinating with roommates. It doesn’t let people see your favorites list, though… you’ll have to send them a favs list share URL for that (save the favorites list, send the URL that comes in the email).

The Link/Embed screen also presents you with HTML code that lets you embed a small version of the current view of PadMapper on one of your sites. If you’re a realtor/broker and you’d like an embeddable version of PadMapper with just your listings shown, contact me at padmapper@gmail.com – this has been available for a while for you all.

Facebook Listing Sharing: On the bottom of the preview bubbles, you’ll see a little FBook logo and a link that will let you share any listing on Facebook, or send it to someone as part of a message.

A bunch of other tweaks… Most of the things done aren’t deserving of their own mention, as they’re mostly polish/small bug fixes.

Major changes often introduce a few bugs here and there. If you find any issues, please don’t hesitate to contact me at padmapper@gmail.com so that I can start working on fixing them.

All you have to do is navigate to the area you want to get alerts for (zoom in – the area is defined by the boundaries of the visible map in your browser), get the filters to represent what you want, click either the subscribe button below the filters or the “Listing Alerts” link in the bar of links at the top of the filter area, enter an email address, and submit, and you’ll start getting alerts when new apartment rental listings match what you’re looking for.

When you want the emails to stop coming, just click the unsubscribe link in one of them, and you’ll be instantly unsubscribed.

As always, if there are any issues, please email them to padmapper@gmail.com.

Thanks, and happy hunting!

Now for the caveats.

The first caveat is that there might be new markers and old ones might have dropped off. This happens, the map is always changing. Zoom in, or narrow down with the filters, and you’ll probably be able to find any dissapeared ones, unless it’s really old, in which case someone’s probably grabbed it anyway and it’s best to move on before you get too attached…

Caveat #2 is that if you quit your browser, PadMapper won’t persist, and you’ll have to start over again. I should probably extend the cookie life… Also, if you clear your cookies, your PadMapper progress will be wiped off the face of the internet. Then again, this is handy if you want to wipe your PadMapper progress off the face of the internet so you can get a fresh start…

Caveat #3 is that I didn’t make workplace distance filtering persistent. It would have been a disproportionate amount of work to make it work well, and I’m considering removing it anyway (or at least moving it to something like an “advanced filters” tab.)

I know that’s a lot of caveats, but hopefully the non-caveated parts make up for it. Everything else should work the way you expect it to, so if not, or if you encounter bugs, etc. please email padmapper@gmail.com. Thanks everyone!

Currently this is a bit of a test, so PadMapper will not be providing all of Oodle’s listings yet. Be patient, if it goes well, it’ll be expanded.

On the other hand, if Oodle listings make the experience worse for you, please let me know (padmapper@gmail.com).

I hope you like the addition!