from Hacker News

RentHop (YC S09) Launches Algorithmic Apartment Search In Boston

by lzhou on 4/23/12, 9:34 PM with 22 comments

  • by tibbon on 4/23/12, 10:08 PM

    Seems, not quite there yet. I like living in Somerville, which is one of the neighborhoods it indexes.

    1) It only returns 19 results for Somerville

    2) None of them allow cats (really? Every apartment I've lived in Somerville was more than happy to have cats).

    3) There is no option to search for ones with garages (yes, there are garages in Somerville!)

    4) There is no feedback as to where this Hop Score comes from (freshness, quality, manager? How do they know who a good landlord is?)

    I'm not sure what this does for me honestly over other services. It looks nice. But 3 years, MIT developers and funding don't seem to add up here.

    Fundamentally, the problem of indexing information about apartments is still broken completely, and no one seems to be able to fix it.

  • by tibbon on 4/23/12, 10:02 PM

    Why not just link directly to the site itself, instead of some 3rd party site? http://boston.renthop.com/

  • by benologist on 4/23/12, 10:09 PM

    Thrillist looks like they've taken the garbage tactics of AOL and somehow managed to make them even more shit - the website the whole article about is linked only through a redirect-with-our-frame-at-the-top script at the bottom of it.

  • by nihaar on 4/24/12, 12:03 AM

    Congrats! Having worked with the founders, I can attest to them being "data geeks". I am a big fan of RentHop NYC and also cant wait till they expand to other markets like SF =)

  • by MaxGabriel on 4/24/12, 4:12 AM

    Have you considered varying the annotations on your map to help differentiate apartments? Hipmunk did a blog post explaining their approach to this, I think it helps you to read data from the map and makes it more visually interesting. http://blog.hipmunk.com/1/post/2012/01/the-making-of-hotel-s...

  • by chrisballinger on 4/23/12, 9:54 PM

    Is this just a ripoff of PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com)?

  • by mayava on 4/23/12, 9:48 PM

    Can't wait for this to come to the Bay Area. SF apartment hunting is a nightmare!

  • by dkmoon81 on 4/24/12, 12:03 AM

    In the end - don't we need to see on the effectiveness of the system as time progresses? That seems to be one of RentHops big wins -> clean data develops allows for better algorithmic learning?

  • by o0oooooo on 4/23/12, 9:44 PM

    finally,!!! Boston.