PadMapper Helps You to Find Apartments for Rent on CraigsList

Where do you turn when you need to find apartments for rent? Do you go to your local real estate agent? Do you grab the newspaper every day?

Maybe you ask your friends – or beg and plead?

Everyone knows that your first stop should be CraigsList regardless of where you live. I have found my last 3 apartments via CraigsList but this little gem called PadMapper makes it so much easier and more enjoyable! The site isn’t as cutting edge as it used to be (CraigsList that is) but it is very functional. How can we improve the quality of data that we grab from this site? Well I have a way for you!

I know that I have wished for a Google Maps type application within CraigsList to see my choices on a map with the ability to filter out the same stuff you can on CraigsList’s website like bedrooms, bathrooms and price.

This is exactly what PadMapper did – they mashed up CraigsList’s apartment listings with a Google Map. Now you can see all the available apartments in your area on a map!   Let’s take a look at the site:

When you first arrive at PadMapper you will see their slogan which explains it all – Making Apartment Hunting Suck Less! I love it! Simply start typing a city or address into the first field and you will be whisked away to a Google Map. You can set your criteria first but I will get back to that in a minute.

I started typing New York and I immediately had a United States Map on my screen. As I hit GO the map became localized to NYC.

There are a lot of listings here.  We would now want to filter out all the undesirable apartments for rent and narrow down our search.

We do this by clicking on the Filter Listings option at the bottom of the PadMapper bubble.

You can see that you can set Max/Min Rent price, number of bedrooms, maximum price per bedroom, maximum age of listing, keywords to be found in the listing or title, and if you are in NYC you can make sure you can get to work via the subway.

Wow! And still there are more options including pictures, sublets or no sublets and they also search Apartments.com (apparently).

After you get to narrow down your choices you can click on one of them and it will bring up a bubble with your selections options like the picture you see below:

Once you have the listing up you can email the owner directly, save to favorites in Google Maps, see a street view or report the listing. Oh and of course you can open the Craigslist listing with one click as well!

How do you find apartments for rent in this day and age?  Do you know of other sites that aggregate data on apartments from other sites?

If so, we would love to hear about it in the comments.