Find apartments by commute times

http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/

by DanielRibeiro • 15 years ago

113 39 15 years ago

ebaysucks• 15 years ago

This is a great idea.

I once read a lesswrong.com article on how commute times are one of the most underrated aspects in picking a place to live.

Of course, this also means you will have some teaching to do.

davidandgoliath• 15 years ago

http://padmapper.com is a much better system than this & it also includes the walkscore of an area. It's a site that maps out apartments from craigslist & other sources on a google map.

Have used it to find my last ~7 apartments/houses.

jaredsohn8• 15 years ago

I like how this site offers a feature where you tell it how long of a mass transit commute is acceptable and it shows you those places. I don't think padmapper offers that.

jasonlotito• 15 years ago

Yes, it does. That's what he was saying. Padmapper does this, with multiple settings in the search as well.

FrojoS2• 15 years ago

This is a great idea but it doesn't seem to work well yet. I tried 'mass av 77 cambridge ma' (MIT) and apartments within 5 min walking distance from that address where supposed to take 14 mins according Walkscore. Also, it doesn't make sense to me to show a transit commute for such apartments.

jaredsohn8• 15 years ago

>Also, it doesn't make sense to me to show a transit commute for such apartments.

Then don't. You can tell it to look at walking, biking, car, or mass transit.

FrojoS2• 15 years ago

Well obviously I used that option. My point it shouldn't show a transit option as default for a workplace that is closer than the train/bus station.

Aloisius• 15 years ago

Wow, that is very cool. I'm totally going to recommend it to new employees who are looking for apartments.

It seems to correctly pick up pockets in San Francisco where you can take BART from and not show you things closer to your destination, but out of reach of mass transit options.

philfreo• 15 years ago

YES!!! I was literally searching everywhere for this only 1 week ago and determined that there was nothing good out there.

Relevant: http://youtu.be/zJOS0sV2a24?t=4m

Now, if only there was a way to enter 2 addresses (for spouses/roommates) and have it give you the places with the best cumulative commute times. EDIT: Just saw Mapnificent does this!

Would also love to see this fully integrated into http://padmapper.com.

SandB0x• 15 years ago

For this but without the apartment bit: http://www.mapnificent.net/

mopatches• 15 years ago

Very cool! Can you add the ability to filter by price range too?

armandososa• 15 years ago

It's there. Expand the filters box on the lower left corner. Also filter by # of bedrooms

kemiller• 15 years ago

For those of us chained down by mortgage: how about job listings within n minutes of my house?

dennyferra• 15 years ago

A great idea. I would even be curious to see a heatmap of job availability in my area and then get travel time as I looked through them.

davidcuddeback• 15 years ago

Well done. I hacked together something similar about a year ago when I moved to San Francisco, because I needed a place within walking distance to my work, within walking distance to BART (for my girlfriend's commute), and that allows cats [1]. It helped me find the perfect place.

It's cool to see that there is now a general-purpose tool like the one that I made last year. I'll definitely use it next time I move. A couple things about this tool weren't obvious to me on my first experience:

1) I didn't know what a "walk score" was. I looked briefly for an explanation on the site, but didn't find one. At first I thought higher was worse, as if it were a measure of how far you had to walk to get to work. But by playing around on the site for a bit, it seems like higher is better, and it seems to be a measure of how accessible shops and necessities are by walking out your front door (that alone is really cool). My apartment scores a 92.

2) One implication of not understanding the "walk score" was that I thought the walk score filter was to limit the search results by how long your commute was. When I input my work address, my apartment wasn't within the search radius, so I actually wanted to expand the search radius. (Walking 2 miles to work everyday is a nice way to get some exercise, but my commute is only 10 minutes if I decide to bike.) It took me a minute to notice the "time" filter at the top of the page.

3) Lastly, I didn't see how to filter by whether a place allows dogs or cats, but then I found that you can expand the filter box to filter by pets, price, and bedrooms. Perfect.

Now that I've figured out those three issues, the site is easy to use and I look forward to using it next time I move. It makes the tool that I hacked together for this purpose obsolete.

[1] https://github.com/dcuddeback/apartment-scrape

jprobert2• 15 years ago

Padmapper already does this and does it well

jprobert2• 15 years ago

Sometimes I don't get why this community gets so pumped up about certain things

jaredsohn8• 15 years ago

Yes, Padmapper does this general kind of thing but it doesn't offer the ability to limit a search based on commute times (which is the title of the post.)

jessedhillon• 15 years ago

Padmapper does it, but not that well. The user interface was miserable for a long time, now it's just bad.

perssontm• 15 years ago

This is great, we thought about something similar when finding a new office. The middle-point between 3 coworkers, with least commutetime for everyone.

We did find something in the end, but it was a really manual process.

Rebranding it and doing an new-office-locator might work as well. :)

zackadams• 15 years ago

This is a much needed and well implemented tool for apartment searchers, well done! I live in Atlanta and have always considered commute time when looking for a home and searching for jobs. I've looked for tools like this for years and haven't found anything that comes close.

mapgrep• 15 years ago

This app is pulling data from Craigslist. But how? There is no API and the company is ruthless about going after scrapers. Search for 'Atwood' here http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...

This is a fantastic idea, I just wonder how sustainable it is.

jaredsohn8• 15 years ago

Padmapper has been doing the same for awhile. From a technical standpoint, you can get data easily via RSS.

cwp• 15 years ago

Neat! I love how it can figure out what (possibly discontiguous) areas give the required commute time by transit. Doesn't seem to have any apartments, though.

EDIT: It finds apartments in New York; maybe it just doesn't work in Canada. Which is odd, given Craigslist works fine in Canada and it figures out commute times in Canada.

clistctrl• 15 years ago

This is awesome!

It's a great MVP, Would love to see more break down options (such as pets)

rmk• 15 years ago

Amazing site. Great effort!!

I had a bug to report: When I move the slider on the 'number of bedrooms' and make it '1', I cannot change it (to '2', say). I am using chrome 14.0.835.186.

jfb• 15 years ago

I. LOVE. THIS.

That is all.

EDIT: I'm looking to move across the bay, and this has brought some areas of Oakland to my attention that I had previously neglected. Too, it's a cool hack. So -- useful, and "I wish I'd thought of it". Killer combo.

bendmorris• 15 years ago

This is awesome. It would be nice if you could choose to display real estate for sale as well.

Terretta• 15 years ago

Love the walkability score concept. Current digs get a score of 92, but that isn't obvious to folks that don't know the area so this did very well to figure that out. Falls down just a little on commuter trains, which don't seem to get a bonus versus buses, though in real life, the trains are faster, easier, and less tiresome.

However, the car commute times from a certain address seem computed oddly.

Picking, for example, 199 Elm Street, New Canaan, CT, shows 10 minute drives from what it considers main roads (because they have route numbers?) while not revealing the parallel side roads which actually have much lower times thanks to no traffic lights or stop signs. I've checked a number of areas on both coasts, and the same seems to be true: car commute times are based on main routes, not low traffic alternate routes. (The mountain roads NW of LA instead of the interstate are another example.)

That said, this is fantastic, and since the map is shown, you can probably eyeball the alternate routes to find a perfect low hassle drive.

Will be recommending this to my realtor friends working in highly walkable areas to help show the benefits.

pivo• 15 years ago

It seems like it doesn't know that you can walk across bridges. I tried it with my work address "1 Main St, Cambridge MA" and it showed me walkable apartments in Cambridge only, even though there were closer apartments just across the Longfellow bridge in Boston.

When I switched to any of the other options it showed me Boston places.

niels_olson• 15 years ago

Love this. I've been trying to get my wife to move downtown for a while, this actually shows there are units in our market available. Thank you so much!

Find apartments by commute times

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