MyApartmentMap Apartment Blog

MyApartmentMap’s Dirtiest Apartment Contest

The MyApartmentMap Dirtiest Apartment Contest is live! Do you live like a slob or just haven’t had the time to clean your apartment? Well, now is your chance to be rewarded for your lack of cleanliness and or laziness. We will be giving away three prizes:1st: $1,000, 2nd: $500, 3rd: $300.

All you need to do is take a picture or pictures of your dirty apartment and submit it here:

http://www.myapartmentmap.com/contest/dirtiest_apartment/

For official contest rules, prizes and how to win, please visit the contest page listed above.

Tags: Contest, dirty apartment, messy apartment
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Installed GeoDjango

I installed GeoDjango today and it really was not that bad considering the number of pieces that had to be built from source.  I started with CentOS 5.3 and followed the installation instruction on the GeoDjango page. 

I’m working my way through the zipcode tutorial just to get familiar with the code.  So far so good.  I think I’m going to be able to do a lot more cool things with GeoDjango than my current setup (PHP and MySQL Spatial Extensions).  

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MyApartmentMap Moving to Django

MyApartmentMap has been in development for around 3 years.  The frontend is written in PHP using a custom framework.  As we continue to add more features the site becomes more and more difficult to maintain with the current PHP codebase.

The backend of MyApartmentMap is written completly in Python which I greatly prefer to PHP.  Python is built from the ground up to be object oriented and the syntax is very short and easy to understand.

That being said, we have decided to rebuilt MyApartmentMap from the ground up using Django and more specifically the GeoDjango contribution.  Django is a high level web framework that abstracts much of the “boring” code that is required of all websites.  In the 3-4 weeks that I have been playing around with Django, I believe it will offer at least a 50% decrease in coding time for any given feature.

I will be updating the blog with the current progress and my ongoing thoughts about Django.

You can also follow me on twitter where I will post more frequent updates.

Follow me on Twitter

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New Rental Data Tool

Yesterday we released a new Rental Data tool on MyApartmentMap.   You can use this tool to find the average rents in almost any area.  You simply go to the city your interested in, for example you might want to see New York City Rental Statistics, and drag the marker around to see the minimum, maximum and average rents in that area.   

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If your interested in some of the technology we used to create this tool..  

The backend uses MySQL with spatial extensions turned on.  We store the latitude and longitude and then create a spatial index on these points.  Without using spacial extensions doing radius searches with floating point longitude and latitudes would be impossible.  In testing, I found that it could take 4-5 seconds per query whith a large database.

The charts are all done with the Google Chart Api.  I found this API to be great and really easy to use.  I was amazed at the level of customization that could be had with merely passing url parameters.

The backend is written all in Python and uses the GeoPy library.  I find python is really great for quickly coding backend processes.  

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any technical questions that I could help with. 

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Top 10 States to Collect Unemployment

After reading the horrible unemployment numbers that were released today, I started to wonder what states had the highest unemployment benefits.  I found a recent AP article that listed the benefits per state, but it was not ajusted by cost of living.  So I took the CPI for every state and ran it against the unemployment numbers.  Here is what I got.

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Rents Down, Vacancies Up

It appears that no industry is safe from the economic downturn.  According to Yahoo! Finance rents are down and vacancies are up across many metro areas.  My question is, where are people living?  Are lower end apartments seeing a decrease in vacancies?

I’m willing to bet that apartment complexes are suffering more than smaller apartment buildings and multi-family houses.  While apartment complexes offer more amenities, local landlord have lower overhead and often have cheaper rents.  In tough economic times do people really need pools, fitness centers, game rooms and club houses?  The current trend of cutting back on every day luxuries is sure to carry over to the apartment rental market.

It will be interesting to see how the economic downturn effects apartment rental sites like MyApartmentMap.  I would suspect that with vacancies down, landlord and apartment complexes will be competing over a smaller share of tenants.   Does that mean that owners will have to increase their marketing budgets to fill their vacancies?   I imagine sites that allow users to post for free will see an increase in the amount of new listings.

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Sword Fighting on Google Street View

Who says Google Street view is only good for useful things like directions and finding apartments. The Google Street view van found this gem in Pittsburgh PA.  There must be some sort of rift in space-time that has caused these two warriors to travel hundreds of years into the future.  What are the chances the Google Street View van was driving by just at the right time?

See for yourself at Google Maps

Tags: street view, sword fighting, time travel
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Introducing the Apartment RSS Builder

I just finished coding a new feature for the site.  It’s an RSS Feed Builder for Apartments. You just select the location you want to search for apartments, the search radius in miles, and then enter the specifics about the apartment you are looking for.

What makes it really cool is that you can pin point all the way down to a specific address.  So if you want to find an apartment near your school or work, just enter the address and we will spit out an RSS feed with apartments nearest to that address.

Here is a screen shot below.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.  Thanks!

Tags: Apartments, rss
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Apartment RSS Feeds

We just released RSS feeds for all our cities.  Just go to the city and subscribe to the RSS feed on that page, the link is listed on the left hand side of the city page.  Subscribing to an RSS feed will allow you to keep on top of the newest apartments listed on MY Apartment Map.  Our apartment listings update several time a day so if you are actively seeking an apartment this may save you some time.

Here is an example of a few popular apartment feeds.

Boston Apartments Rss Feed

New York City Apartments Rss Feed

Philadelphia Apartments Rss Feed

Los Angeles Apartments Rss Feed

Please let us know if you have any trouble accessing the feeds.

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Census: New Orleans fastest-growing city in US

The US Census bureau is reporting today that New Orleans, hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was the fastest-growing large city in the nation between July 1, 2006, and July 1, 2007. This follows the city having the largest rate of population loss since 2000.

The report states New Orleans’ population rose by 13.8 percent. New Orleans population now stands at 239,124. Although New Orleans led the nation in growth percentage wise, Houston was actually the city named in the report as leading the nation in numerical population increase. The top 10 cities that led the nation in numerical population increase are as follows:

Houston
Phoenix
San Antonio
Fort Worth
New Orleans
New York City
Atlanta
Austin
Charlotte
Raleigh

That’s 3 Texas cities that made the top 10, which leads me to believe that a large chunk of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina moved West to Texas.

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