easilyexcitable.com » Aspirations

The Craigslist-Renter Problem

Nick — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:45:44 +0000

I’ve started casually looking for apartments with a friend of mine, and I’m running into the same problem many of you are:

Craigslist is the best-worst place to find an apartment.
There’s a pile of spam/duplicate listings
Many listings are misleading (at best)

So while the Craig-team has clearly created a very lean, useful tool which all of us are using, it goes for the lowest common denominator and doesn’t really fit my needs as a guy looking for an apartment to rent. They’ve gone with the catch-all model: What’s useful for selling your bike, or finding a fetishist to bang should be equally useful for finding a place to live, right?

Wrong.

So I’ve started thinking and doodling and I’d like to share what I’ve come up with for feedback.

Problem 1: Accountability. There isn’t any. Sure you can flag a spammer, but the spamhead can just add a new listing every day for his shitty apartment. He can say it’s $500. But $500 what? $500 per room? The whole apartment? Per month/year/week/day?

What if everyone were accountable? What if landlords had to create an account with a username? What if renters past, present, and future could rate them and refer them? What if only one listing per apartment was allowed at any one time? Sure this might scare away a bit of the volume that Craigslist has, but that volume is just noise.

Problem 2: Bait-and-switch. Spamhead has listed an apartment in Venice. It’s 3 bedrooms, listed at $2,400 a month. You live in the Valley. You drive through traffic to go look at the place, and the place is a decrepit shithole. Thanks for wasting my time dude.

Photos should be mandatory. Video walkthroughs should be encouraged. And if I go to see a place with my camera, I should be able to upload my photos to the listing. Imagine that.

Problem 3: I don’t want to start a search from scratch every time I log into Craigslist. I lose what I was doing, and the simple “bookmarking” they have on the site is horrid.

I want to be able to save place, flag places, map multiple places… I want to be able to import addresses of my friends and family from my address book and see where they are in relation to my new place. I want to be able to calculate the average distance of my potential new apartment from my girlfriend’s apartment, my best friend James’ apartment, and the nearest Apple Store.

If I’m a biker, I want to see what’s within biking distance of the place I’m looking at. Is there a movie theater? A great bar? Yelp can certainly tell me, but why should I have to open a new browser tab and do the math for myself. I want to click on a potential apartment and have it tell me that it’s walking distance to my girlfriend’s place and 2.1 miles from the nearest In-N-Out.

Problem 4: I’m moving to a new city and don’t know what the renters laws are, or if I’m getting ripped off on the price.

Aggregated renters rights laws based on where you’re looking, plus a realtime average of rent prices based on my search parameters in a given area. I’m looking for a spacious 3 bedroom in Culver City: what are my neighbors paying?

Problem 5: I’ve found a few potential places, looked at them, talked to the landlord, and now I’ve got to fill out 5 overly complex renters applications and undergo a credit check.

Hey High School Seniors: remember the common application? What if I already had a pre-filled renters application, a verified credit score, and a references from past landlords saying how dandy of a guy I am? What if I could just click a button, and presto, the landlord has all my shit instantly? From the landlord’s POV, what if I could fire up my little app and get a list of all the potential applicants, their credit ratings and referrals? I could just sort a list, pick the kid with the best credit score and references, and be on my effing way.

In a world where we’re drowning in data, Craigslist does not make it simple for me to plug in specific, renter-oriented parameters for me to search by. Sure they’ve got price parameters and ZIP codes, and “only show listings with photos” (which are usually just jpg footers from a douchey realtor embedded in the listing).

But what about all these great APIs lying around out there? What about Google Maps integration? Facebook Connect? Yelp? Wikipedia? Happy Hour App? (Had to sneak that in there.)

This really isn’t complicated stuff people. Someone just needs to say “enough” with Craigslist, I don’t give a rip about missed fucking connections, I just want to find a nice place to live with the least amount of hassle possible.

If you build it, they will come.

Please let me know what you think. Have I left anything out? I love thought experiments, and I’m open to anyone that has ideas that is fed up with CL and wants a simpler, more elegant solution to forking over huge gobs of money to people wealthier than me.

Good day.

First Attempt at a Twitter Meme (exciting?)

Nick — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:31:29 +0000

So I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around some of the more profound aspects of Twitter. If you ask me, it’s all leading up to telepathy. Mark my derned words. And I think that’s pretty fuckin’ exciting.

So I tried to start a little Twitter meme the other day, just for fun because I was curious if it could be done.

The up side was, a lot of people participated, and they got really creative.

The down side was most of the responses were my friends.

WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT, THAT’S NOT A DOWNSIDE!

The idea was: Live every day like __________ (fill in the blank, duh)

This is what started to come out of people’s minds, in no particular order:

Live every day like you’re George Harrison and it’s 1968.
@RyanHindinger: Live every day like you’re Keith Richards.
@daneensley: live everyday like you’re Joey Ramone circa 1976.
@eddiequintana: live every day like you’re Desmond from LOST.
@unknownpenguin: Live every day like it’s a closed course and you’re a trained driver.
@WoodyTondorf: live every day like you’re jack bauer in the afternoon.
@ashtonmike: Live each day like a bored Richard Branson looking for something to do.
@ashtonmike: Live each day like Tommy Lee’s Weiner
Live every day like you’re the love child of Jim Henson and Roald Dahl.
@TCFS live everyday like you’re a kobe cow
Live every day like you’re on the boat, the Orca, in Jaws.
Live every day like you just accidentally started the Protestant Reformation.
@Alifjack: live everyday like you only have a spork
@kimskitchensink Live every day like you can inspire humanity.
@ebregman: Live every day like you are plummeting toward Earth.
Live every day like your blood is açai juice.
@WoodyTondorf Live every day like a Michael Bay movie.
@davecrabtree Live every day like you’re a potato in Ireland during the 1840s.
@davecrabtree Live every day like you’re John Wilkes Booth on the run with a injured leg.
@claylarsen: Live every day like there is still one more Golden Ticket to be found.
@joey1980 Live every day like a Knowledge Farmer: Planting, cultivating, and harvesting Knowledge.
@davecrabtree Live every day like you’ve accidentally time-traveled to the middle ages, and you’re desperate to get back to the present day.
@imsosorry live every day like you’re David after the dentist, remixed.
@juliabetley live every day like you’re Michael Corleone
Live every day like you’re the love child of Jim Henson and Roald Dahl.
@WoodyTondorf live every day like someone just gave you up to the Feds.
@jeniclark Live each day like David Duchovny’s right hand.
@ashtonmike Live each day like your Eleanor, the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500, from Gone In 60 Seconds, and Memphis Raines is on your tail.
@ashtonmike Live each day like John Wayne Bobbit. The man who had his entire body cut off…..and all that was left was his penis.

What did we learn from this little exercise? That my friends are witty, referential, and often try to one-up each other. BUT THEY SURE A HELL KNOW HOW TO THINK EXCITING.

That’s why I’m officially changing the tagline of this blog.

EasilyExcitable.com: Think Exciting!

Excitable Aspirations

Nick — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:13:45 +0000

Dane and I were brainstorming the other day, and something pee-inducingly exciting occurred to us. The best job in the world, if you’re a creative, would probably be writing/producing Sesame Street. Bear with me.

Sesame Street is like Saturday Night Live in almost every regard, except people don’t judge you as harshly, and you get to teach kids things.

But it’s exactly like SNL in that you have nearly unlimited access to any actor, politician, or public figure; and you can make them do almost anything. You could actually probably get away with more on SS. Picture Dame Judi Dench dressed up as a talking tree on SNL. Doesn’t work, does it? But she’d do it on SS without batting an eyelash.

And I imagine the writer’s room at SS being filled with Macs, toys, candy, and poster of Nelson Mandela on the wall. How much of a freaking dream come true would that setup be?

A sampling of what you can get away with as a writer/producer on Sesame Street (I want in):