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Whenever I’m forced to look into moving to another town or city anywhere throughout the United States, I’ve always dreaded the apartment hunting process. Sifting through countless old rental ads in the weekly newspaper is the very last thing I want to do on a Sunday afternoon. Even worse; making phonecalls, setting up viewings, and dealing with the variety of potential landlords - an assortment of snakes and sleazebags most of the time. Luckily, the magic of the Internet now simplifies the process of hunting for an apartment. The following top 5 apartment search websites are sure to make your next move significantly easier than your last. How do you determine which apartment search websites are the top five? For me, it comes down to to three things - simplicity, features, and results. The site needs to be simple enough so that I can get in and out and do what I need to do without requiring a training course on how to navigate the website. The website should also provide all of the features that an apartment hunter demands, such as the ability to visually tour apartments or filter search criteria. Most importantly, the site should return the largest number of results as possible. The following websites meet those basic requirements, and some of them have a few nice bonus features as well. According to RealEstateRama, the following were the top ten apartment hunting websites based on the number of times visitors “checked availability” of an apartment on the website. Popularity is one thing, but as MakeUseOf readers know, features and quality are often far more important than popularity. With this in mind, I tested all ten websites, and have rated the top five apartment search websites based on design, features and ease of use. Starting off the countdown at number five, Move.com makes the cut with a clean and efficient design. Move.com lets you search by price range as well as beds and baths, but in addition you can also search by property type as well as amenities and pet requirements. There are article listings under home finance, moving, and home & garden categories. However, the overall focus of the website seems to be geared toward motivating people away from renting and into becoming a first time home buyer. Two identical sections to the rental search are parallel searches for New Homes and Existing Homes. The search results included 5 detailed photo listings coming up for Portland, Maine, and all listings including estimated rent prices. The search here is focused on the specific town that you’re looking for, but you can heavily refine that search with the terms listed in the left menu bar. ApartmentGuide is a very simple, stripped down apartment search where you search by price, beds and baths, property name, or location. The results come up in a clear photo format with a cool interactive map showing where each property is located. While this site returned fewer results for Portland, Maine (3 vs. 5) than Move.com did, it is still ranked higher due to the fact that the site is devoted to only apartments, and because this website is one of the few apartment search sites that provides a truly interactive map where you can access the listings by clicking an icon within the map. The site also performs an “intelligent” search for rentals within communities that surround the city you searched. My favorite feature of the site, however, is the stylish slideshow that’s offered for every property. This feature alone is a valuable way to get a nice tour of a property well before you take the trip to check it out in person. ApartmentHomeLiving is the sort of website that you’ll want to visit even if you’re not looking for an apartment. The feel of the sight is light and airy, and the motto says it all, “Live for hot chocolate.” The search results are nice photo listings pulled from the Apartments.com database, but they aren’t anything to call home about. What makes this apartment search site stand out is obviously the content. There are loads of great features and “answers” about everything to do with moving and apartment living. In essence this site is like a “souped-up” version of Apartments.com, with a dash of fun thrown in. In the search area, you can even find an apartment based on your personality! Often copied, but still one of the forerunners in the apartment search business, Apartments.com provides greater search features and a better site design than the majority of competitors. From the very first page, you’ve got a large clickable map for easy one-click apartment searching. Or if you prefer, you can search by typing the location, and also by a whole list of apartment characteristics like type of housing, beds and baths, whether it’s pet friendly, or the apartment and community amenities. The listings are detailed, with the ability to save results to “favorites,” clear pricing, and many properties offer a “360 degree” tour. Apartments.com is one of the few websites that lists private rental properties as well as large managed properties. In the case of my search for Portland, Maine, the results returned included 8 managed and 2 private rentals. The site also offers valuable content for renters including sections titled moving center, apartment living, manager center, and landlord resources. Rent.com is, by far, the king of the apartment search domain. The site is clearly professionally designed, with a fast and easy initial page featuring a basic search. Unfortunately, to use Rent.com you need to enter your email address. However, I’ve used Rent.com for over three years and have never had a problem with spam through the site. The power of Rent.com, and the main reason it remains the king of the hill is its extensive apartment database that includes not only managed apartment buildings, but also condos, townhouses and houses. The bottom line is that Rent.com returns more results than any other site - for my test search for the small city of Portland, Maine, it returned 18 listings. The listings include large, clear photos and photo galleries, lots of specific details about the apartments, and the price range is clearly displayed on every listing. The “moving center” section of the website offers renters help with transferring utilities and insurance, dealing with truck rentals and storage, and the millions of other details that renters have to worry about during a move.Rating the Top Five U.S. Apartment Search Websites
#5 - Move.com
#4 - ApartmentGuide.com
#3 - ApartmentHomeLiving.com
#2 - Apartments.com
#1 - Rent.com
As bulldozers and backhoes start digging away at stimulus-funded road construction projects, one researcher is looking for ways to maximize the existing road infrastructure through computers and calculations. Randall Guensler, a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is currently working on the latest phases of two Georgia-based studies of "managed lane use," in which drivers are encouraged to adopt behaviors that improve traffic flow. Two well-known examples of managed lane use include congestion pricing and fee-for-entry limited access lanes. "Many experts now believe that actively managing lane use can provide greatly improved service without having to construct extra lanes," Guensler said in a statement. "These managed-lane strategies can be implemented for minimal cost, especially when compared to the land and construction cost, the traffic problems and the demolition issues involved in building new roads." Georgia's two pilot programs, Commute Atlanta and The Congestion Pricing Project, are collecting data about whether lane management works and how drivers feel about it. Reducing the number of cars on the road during peak hours adds to highway capacity, as a roadway can handle more vehicles per hour when bottlenecks and jams are reduced or eliminated. According to Guensler, more vehicles per hour can travel through limited-access lanes because they are less traveled and therefore less congested. "From an engineering standpoint, traffic flow is the product of vehicle speed and traffic density – that is, the speed of the vehicles and how closely are they following each other," he said. Commute Atlanta collected data from GPS trackers installed in the cars of 470 Atlanta-area volunteer households. At first, average household travel patterns were collected and analyzed. Households who were able to reduce their monthly totals were given financial incentives. In the next phase, commuters will endure simulated peak-hour congestion pricing in which drivers are charged for travel during peak hours. This phase will also test improved tracking devices that eliminate toll booths by automatically detecting and charging drivers who have entered limited access lanes or traveled during peak hours. If thoughts of tracking devices make you nervous, you may want to participate in the focus groups of The Congestion Pricing Project, separate from Commute Atlanta but also involving Guensler. The project analyzed the opinions of Atlanta-area drivers regarding congestion pricing and limited-access lanes through a series of focus groups. Some of the results were surprising: "Our focus group work revealed interesting points, including the fact that income groups that wouldn’t generally use value priced lanes still liked having them available," Guensler said. "There are times when everyone finds that these lanes are a good economic decision -- such as when you’re late for daycare, and you’re facing dollar-a-minute overtime charges." Guensler was hard at work when Wired contacted him, but he promised to update us on project progress as implementation continues. We'll keep you posted.
There's been a lot of talk lately about the decline and fall of newsweeklies, some of it fueled by the shift of U.S. News & World Report to biweekly, and then monthly, publication. But U.S. News hasn't given up on the idea of the weekly news digest. In fact, later today, in a soft launch, it will rolling out a new product: a "digital newsweekly" that reproduces, in pixels, what the magazine once did in ink and paper.
"We're creating a tailored product for readers that does what the old newsweeklies did, which was to stop time for people and say 'What the heck happened over the last week?' and make sense of it," says editor Brian Kelly.
U.S. News Weekly, as the new publication is called ("It sounds ironic," acknowledges Kelly) will be produced and delivered as a downloadable PDF file, laid out in the form of a magazine, complete with a cover and table of contents. For years, publishers have been offering such digital editions of their magazines with the help of vendors such as Zinio, but U.S. News Weekly is a whole new, albeit related, publication, edited for a somewhat different audience than U.S. News & World Report. Whereas the parent title has gravitated toward advertiser-friendly topics like health and education, the digital weekly will be "very Washington-centric," says Kelly, with a tighter focus on politics and policy.
Since there's less ad support for that type of content, U.S. News Weekly will be a premium product: A one-year subscription will cost $19.95 (although subscribers to U.S. News & World Report will be able to download it for free). "This is what every editor's trying to figure out right now -- how can I pay my reporters to do reporting?" says Kelly. "You've got to figure out a way where, on some level, the consumer is going to pay for some type of content." (Of The New York Times's much-maligned premium-content program, Times Select, Kelly says, "I always thought that was an experiment they never should have abandoned. If you can get 200,000 people to pay for a product, you're doing very well.")
The upside for the readers, he notes, is that they're only paying for content -- and not for the expense of shipping and printing. And because there's no need to budget time for those processes, U.S.
News Weekly will have near-instantaneous turnaround: The magazine will close on Thursday night and be made available at noon on Friday."I don't think the newsweekly concept's outdated," says Kelly. "I think it's the delivery method that's outdated. To produce a great report, close the magazine on Thursday night and then readers don't get it until Monday -- that's insane.
