New Website Offers Visual Apartment Search

Moving to a new city? Worried about how you'll find a new place to live? The brand spanking new website HotPads.com is here to help. The flashy interface and extensive information at HotPads.com may make the craigslist housing section a thing of the past. Read on to find out how you can use HotPads.com to find a roommate, a room, a house, or anything in between.

HotPads.com was created to bring together those who are offering property for rent and those who need somewhere to live. The company works with large property owners, who are able to provide listings for all of their rental units, as well as individual landlords. Instead of obtaining information on rental properties through internet searches, HotPads.com relies on its users to provide facts about available rental units.

To list a property, you'll need to create an account. (You don't need an account just to search for a space.) Your account simply allows HotPads.com to associate your properties if you enter multiple units. The only personal information required to create an account is your name, an email address, and a password, so the process isn't an involved one. Owners of property management companies can create a company account to allow multiple users to manage numerous rental listings on HotPads.com.

The website’s attractive layout offers just about every search tool imaginable for specific properties. You can navigate to cities by clicking on the front page’s clearly marked map or conducting a power search. Once you're in the right city, you can simply place your mouse cursor over a property to see its name. To get more details, just click on the apartment building or house icon. It should be noted that the map feature, while easy to use and surprisingly fast, has a shortcoming: you don’t know until you click on a city whether it has rental properties or not. While most major cities will have at least a few listings, HotPads.com is not yet the right place for those who need housing in less heavily populated areas.

To narrow your HotPads.com search, you can slide the price scale up, eliminating cheaper properties. You can also choose whether you’d like a studio or one-, two-, or three-bedroom apartment. The informational tabs offered for each property include Information, Photos, Details, Floor Plans, and Contact information. The information varies according to the level of detail the property owner provided, but HotPads.com offers extensive opportunities for

HotPads.com is a great place for property owners and property seekers to come together to create and use an extensive database of available property listings. Its national, rather than local, focus makes it a convenient place for users to start apartment-hunting regardless of the city where they seek lodging. Many other apartment websites have begun to use HotPads.com’s listings to offer more information to users.

If you need a new pad, HotPads.com can help. However, it won't provide any information that the property lister doesn't want you to know—so mosey on over to rating sites like ApartmentRatings.com for the inside scoop on what the place you're scoping is really like!

The only downside to HotPads.com is they don’t have a ton of listings. You still have to check out other resources like RentClicks.com, Craigslist.org, and Rent.com.