Lovely: Making Apartment Hunting Less Painful

• May 21, 2012

by Shilpi Paul

Lovely

Tired of scrolling through the minimalist, black and white Craigslist interface when searching for an apartment? The website Lovely is making the process more colorful and intuitive for DC apartment hunters. Taking a page from Redfin and Trulia, who use maps to organize data on available homes for purchase, the site at livelovely.com recently launched in the nation’s capital.

To search, you choose a city, street or neighborhood, filter the choices by price, number of bedrooms and pet friendliness and up pops a map with pointers on the available units. (The newest listings are highlighted in red.) Lovely has been operating in San Francisco since late 2011.

Lovely can also help potential renters stand out to landlords. When users sign up, they have the opportunity to fill out a “rental resume” with their impressive renter stats, which the site uses to let them know when apartments in a desired price range and neighborhood pop up; there is also a system that allows users to to email landlords directly.

Right now, many of the listings have been scraped from Craigslist and Trulia. Lovely hopes to allow landlords to post directly to the site soon.

The site is similar to Trulia’s rental offering, Padmapper, and a few other sites. With all these competitors, it seems like Craigslist’s status as the primary apartment hunt destination may soon be in jeopardy.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/lovely_making_apartment_hunting_less_painful/5564