I’ve been apartment shopping lately, trying to price the market and decide where I want to move to. I’ve been primarily searching Craigslist, which offers a lot of listings, sure, but it can be hard to figure out where these apartments are, and there’s not much known about listings just from the title. However, to help out, I recently discovered PadMapper. What this universal app does is that aggregates all the data from Craigslist listings along with around the country. Just list the location to search around, put in some details like the number of bedrooms, rent range, and number of bathrooms, and it will find all apartments that match the criteria listed on a handy Google map. Zooming out to find matches in a wider radius, and in to find them on a street-by-street basis is possible. Just want a filtered list? That’s available too. It’s possible to add notes about specific listings, add them to favorites, and even get directions ot the apartment. Find a good apartment? Just open up the original listing, and find the contact info there. The app aims “to make apartment hunting suck less” and at least, it sure does help. The app is available for free.

FREE!

PadMapper Apartment Search

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2009-02-28 :: Category: Utilities

There are few things in life more stressful than trying to pick out a new house or apartment. All the appointments, showings and prices are enough to make your head spin with information overload, and keeping it all straight can be a major pain. Thankfully the new Cool Igloo app can help you keep things straight, no matter how hectic the hunting becomes.

Cool Igloo allows users to input their ideal attributes for a home including price, square footage and noise level, and then weight each of the factors to contribute to an overall score. By plugging data into each field you can see just how well the property you’re looking at matches your ideal home, and then compare multiple houses or apartments against one another for an objective tally of which is most right for you. The app also includes a handy map feature which shows you where each location is in relation to your current home or workplace so you can easily factor in commute time and how far you’ll have to lug all your stuff.

While the app does a great job of helping you organize what you’ve already looked at, it doesn’t offer any sort of help in searching for potential homes. It would be nice if the app could take the criteria you entered and then scour the web for properties matching what you’re looking for, but that’s not in the cards. Still, for what it is the app works extremely well and offers a great service.

Cool Igloo is available for free, with the option of purchasing a pro version. We only got to test out the base model of the app, so we can’t really speak to what enhancements pro brings, though we know it adds more customizable categories, so you can expand your search to take account of even more factors. If you’re in the market for a new home, this handy free tool can do a lot to assist you in your search.

FREE!

Cool igloo

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-10-15 :: Category: Utilities