Saturday, July 7, 2012

Rent Hop: No Fee rentals. Given that the real estate market in Amsterdam has mostly rentals with fee




One of the most painful things for somebody arriving weekend travel specials in Amsterdam is the apartment search. The first problem is how much the brokers weekend travel specials charge just for moving in a new apartment. There is a lot of demand and they have the advantage over the renters. They routinely ask for one month worth of rent. So we re talking about 1000 to 2000 euros which for a service that basically consists of opening a couple weekend travel specials of doors and showing pictures, seems quite pricey.The other problem is that the apartment search process weekend travel specials just sucks. There are a couple of websites out there, some of which are littered with spam, while the others still do a very poor job of helping weekend travel specials the prospective renter.Still, they seem to be quite successful, as Kamernet, one of the leading websites, makes people pay BOTH for offering an apartment and searching for one. The other websites are so utterly broken that I m sure Kamernet still makes a decent living weekend travel specials out of it. Let s go over the websites you need to check:
This would fetch data from multiple sites that are out there, extract semantic weekend travel specials information from the listings, and present everything in one SIMPLE and consistent interface. That alone would save a lot of time for the prospective renters. However I m not a big fan of this approach, as it relies on data providers weekend travel specials not blacklisting your IP address and cooperating with you. So you would need to convince them it s in their interest to share this data.
I believe the existing state of the art could be vastly weekend travel specials improved. Just by looking at a few rental websites in USA (always leading the pack in this domain), one can spot many improvements over the more basic Dutch websites. For example, Naked Apartments or Rent Hop , among others, are more inspiring:
Rent Hop: No Fee rentals. Given that the real estate market in Amsterdam has mostly rentals weekend travel specials with fees, I think it could be useful to have a website that would provide only listings with no agency fee.
Naked Apartments: I really like the more integrated interface, which the dutch websites sorely need. Simple communication to brokers, simple organization, weekend travel specials more transparency (ratings of properties and brokers would go a long way), guarantee of not dealing with spam etc.

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