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When Jack Fowler moved to San Diego to join his new job, he had limited commute options as he was new to the city and without car for sometime. He definitely wanted to stay closer to his work place which was downtown. His quest for a sublet or an apartment nearby his office was proving a painful exercise as he had to look up houses in San Diego downtown and once he found some decent posting he had to do a Google map lookup to find how close they were to his work place (outside 1-2 miles radius was a big no no). It was not a pleasant experience for him as after doing a map lookup he used to find that the house was not near his work place.

One of his dear friends suggested HousingMaps.com. To Jack’s amazement, the tool was very simple to use and saved him so much time and energy, besides getting him a house of his choice near his work place.

HousingMaps.com, created by Paul Rademacher, a 3-D graphic artist from Santa Clara, California, is a mashup that combines craigslist real estate listings(houses for sale, apartments for rent and sublets) with city maps from Google Maps. It lets users pinpoint locations, along with one-click access to photos and descriptions, of dozens of available apartments in more than 20 North American cities.

Jack could choose the city as San Diego, he opted for rental houses within a price range of $500-$1000 with any number of rooms (he had other options too but he went with default values). Here is what his search returned (click on image to get a bigger picture):

He could click on any of the markers on the map so see details of the house. He could drag to move the map anywhere and limit his search to houses which were within 1-2 miles of his work place.

HousingMaps is an eye-opener, offering a simple and easy-to-navigate interface that lets home and rental shoppers take in a neighborhood of offerings at a glance, complete with locations, prices and, in some cases, pictures

HousingMaps has opened the field to all real-estate sites going that route. It is obviously very intuitive to look for houses within a certain area on a map than in text. With Google Maps, you can also browse surrounding areas and see if you like the neighborhood.

This is one mashup which I found very useful and in my future postings I will cover more mashups which I have found to be useful.

Technorati Tags: housingmaps, rental, sublet, house, google maps, craigslist, mashup, api

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