I'm not the girl you hoped I'd be - Using your cell phone to apartment-hunt

I'm Jenn. I left San Francisco. I also write Infinite Lives.

I started a Tumblr because sometimes you just want to post a ton of quotes, or photos of your Blythe dolls, or links to Radar articles, and even though no one says so outright, you can tell your Twitter friends are getting sick of it.

I used this to make my little service icons. My personal blog is here and my time capsule is here. If you're creepy, you can find comments I've left all over the Internet here.

April 14

Using your cell phone to apartment-hunt

“The evolution of real estate is towards mobile, and we need to make it easier for people to search for properties while they’re on the go,” says Rob Cross of Trulia. Indeed: the last time I scoured a city for an apartment, I did it on foot. I marched up to apartment buildings that had the landlords’ office numbers taped up in the front window; I called from outside each building. Ultimately, I did find an apartment in a neighborhood I liked, but by using Craigslist.

Unfortunately, most iPhone apartment-hunting software scores dismally on the 5-star app scale. It’s a shame, too, because a lot of these new apps use the iPhone’s GPS to search for nearby vacancies.

So I tweeted my plight. “What are the best iPhone apps,” I asked the ether, “for apartment-hunting?”

Six hours later, this guy tweeted back. “build a query of your criteria on craigs and then grab the rss of it!” he suggested.

I marched my browser over to Craigslist. I started small: I searched for all Chicago apartments — any neighborhood — under $1300/mo. (It sounds steep, but $1300/mo will rent a home a million billion jillion times the size of my current San Francisco apartment, which is, ahem, priced similarly.) Anyway, that query generates this link: http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=1300&bedrooms=

Scrolling to the bottom of the screen, there’s an RSS icon, which links to a feed unique to just this particular query. If I grab the link location, I end up with this ugly RSS url: http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=1300&bedrooms=&format=rss

So I plug that URL into bit.ly, which yields a new link: http://bit.ly/2V2Srg (I know this part sounds like overkill, but it’s necessary for the next step!)

Here is the tricky secret: you will arrive at Google Reader’s mobile feedreader if you preface any (er, almost any) feed link with http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/.

In this case, when I visit http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://bit.ly/2V2Srg from my phone, I get an up-to-date, mobile-friendly RSS feed of every Chicago apartment priced under $1300. (It turns out that, for whatever reason, you can’t ‘double-bit.ly’ that final feed, so tinyurl it or whatever instead, like so: http://tinyurl.com/chhowv) And bookmark that shit!

Ultimately, I will end up with several links on my iPhone’s dashboard, with each up-to-date mobile feed representing a different Craigslist neighborhood search. Hot!

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