RentHop (YC S09) Launches Algorithmic Apartment Search In Boston

The map UI is clearly inspired by it, but the data sources are very different. If I understand correctly, RentHop mostly focuses on getting information directly from and making money from rental brokers, whereas PadMapper just tries to index everything it can (PadMapper takes direct listings from a lot of the top agents/agencies in NYC/Boston as well, but lots from Craigslist and other places)

As a result, there are data quality differences (RH's is probably cleaner in some ways if it is mostly direct), but also as a result RH necessarily has less selection and a larger percentage of RH's listings probably come with broker fees. Ultimately, which setup you prefer is down to whether you'd prefer to work with a broker, I think.

jquery• 14 years ago

How do you index from craigslist? They are notorious for sending "cease and desist" orders to companies who try to index them. Do you have some special agreement with them or is a matter of being a small enough fish they haven't noticed you yet?

leelin2• 14 years ago

Hi, I'm one of the RentHop founders. We love what Eric's done with PadMapper. Our focus is primarily sorting on quality. We see most of the messaging and scheduling activity so we can reward the responsive and trustworthy managers while penalizing bad behavior. For example, if an apartment is still available after 15 renters have looked at it over two weeks, that's a terrible sign.

For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data partners and our own observations about a firm's listings. As time passes the scores should differentiate based on individual activities, similar to our NYC rankings.

aneth2• 14 years ago

Isn't PadMapper just a ripoff of http://www.housingmaps.com/, which was the first of its kind?

I developed http://www.cribq.com because at the time, both PadMapper (if it existed, can't remember - according to domain records padmapper.com was registered after CribQ launched) and HousingMaps were too simplistic and behind on listings to use. HousingMaps had no organizational tools - so I suppose PadMapper "ripped" that idea off of me? (CribQ website is not actively developed anymore, but the iPhone app is quite popular.)

Seriously, why does this accusation come up every time someone launches a site with housing listings on a map? Even if the site is similar, there is no shame in "ripping off" ideas - you will always do something different and hopefully better or useful in some way. If you manage to copy an idea and survive, you've either done a better job marketing or a better job building a product for some segment. Either way, we all win.

Developing a site that is an improvement, different take, or even a copy of another is not a ripoff. Is AirBNB a ripoff of VRBO? Is Google a ripoff of AltaVista? Is Gmail a ripoff of HotMail? Is TechStars a ripoff of YC? Facebook a ripoff of Friendster? You may not agree with their tactics in some cases, but generally the founders/creators have a vision that differs from the site they "ripped off" and have a reason for creating their own version. And would somebody PLEASE rip off Craigslist and win?

Copy away. Or as Steve Jobs says, "good artists copy, great artists steal."

ericd3• 14 years ago

It depends on how similar the implementation is. If someone clones all or most of another site's design decisions, I'd say that's not cool and is worthy of derision. There are sites that I would consider clones of PadMapper because they try to do things the same way without adding much new or providing a new take on the problem. That says to me that they didn't have much of a vision, and it's annoying - it seems unlikely that if they were re-deriving solutions to those problems that they'd come up with the same answers for everything.

For an example, see how different the results of our both tackling the same problems were - they barely resemble each other in form or functionality.

But yeah, the basic idea of showing real estate on a map is old, I have a research papers from the 80s that talks about making map-based search systems for real estate. housingmaps is the earliest web-based implementation of the idea that I know of, though, and was my inspiration.

tibbon2• 14 years ago

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

tibbon2• 14 years ago

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.

leelin2• 14 years ago

Hi there, I'm one of the RentHop founders.

For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data partners and our NYC models. We'll be sure our scoring gets smarter and better fit to Boston over time.

dkrich• 14 years ago

Hmm, interesting points. Maybe you noticed that the service JUST LAUNCHED in the Boston area. I'm pretty happy to see this because just today I was wondering why apartment hunting sucks so bad. I've been looking in DC for two weeks now and I still haven't found two people who agree on which neighborhoods/apartments are best.

benologist2• 14 years ago

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.

nihaar• 14 years ago

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 =)

dkmoon81• 14 years ago

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?

MaxGabriel• 14 years ago

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...

RentHop (YC S09) Launches Algorithmic Apartment Search In Boston

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