The Digital Apartment Hunt:
I
don’t know how my mom looked for apartments when she was my age, but I
realized while I was searching through ads on Kijiji that I didn’t know
where else to look for apartments. Then I thought - Craigslist and I
googled “Toronto Apartments” and was a little embarrassed at myself when
I saw that all these sites were similar. The point isn’t that I don’t
know what other websites to look at, but rather that I didn’t know where
to search outside of the web.
I
really started to think about how much the apartment hunt had changed
over the last few years and started to analyze my apartment hunting
process:
- Pick a website/directory – My choice is Kijiji for user friendliness
- Decide on a central location for all searches – I decided that my workplace made the most sense
- Limit/personalize the search by number of bedrooms, pet friendly, etc.
- Start the vetting process
o Only look at locations with pictures
o Utilities included & parking available
o Google Test – yes Google Test
So
the Google Test works like this, take the address from the ad, plug it
into Google Maps and get the TTC directions from work to the apartment,
anything over an hour commute or more than 3 transfers was too hard for a
Monday morning commute and was disregarded in the search. If the
commute is doable, I used Street View to determine if I trusted the
location.
Finally,
after all this preliminary vetting I would e-mail for more information
or a viewing date. This made me wonder: what other products/companies do
I extensively vet before I even give the product a second thought? And
that lead to my Digital Dress Hunt.
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