I tend to begin my housing search on Craigslist, with one or more general areas where I’d like to live in mind. Because location matters to me, I’ve found HousingMaps.com to be incredibly helpful. Unfortunately, it’s doesn’t include Ann Arbor. Other sites do, but aren’t really compatible with how I search for housing – I tend to search across rooms & shares and apartment & house rentals. I do have a definite price ceiling. I’ll often have a potential housemate or two, but with some flexibility in case preferences ultimately diverge. I also want to be able to limit a display to just new listings since I last checked.
So, after growing impatient with existing tools, put together a map of Ann Arbor Craigslist housing listings (sorry, I don’t include homes for sale. It’s not the right time to buy, anyway). You can:
- simultaneously display each of the listing types,
- Filter by price, date posted, and number of bedrooms (all as sliders with min and max), and
- adjust the price filters to work on price per bedroom.
This was pretty fast to throw together thanks to BeautifulSoup, the Google Maps API, and YUI, but I’m sure that there are some rough edges that will need to get worked out.
Also, I don’t know or care whether it works in IE.
Update, 19 February: More locations now available.
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