Matt Baril

Idea #26 Data mining for house/apt listings that would be delivered via email a la Google Alert

One thing Internet has made easy is the creation and sharing of data. What it has made much more difficult is getting information out of this data. For instance, there are dozens of websites listing apartments and houses and the data is out there for everyone to use. Now if you're looking for a 1bd flat which is pet friendly, in Yaletown, laundry in the suite, with a dishwasher for less $1500/month, well good luck! You'll have to visit and look through all the different websites and will have to go over the ads manually to see if the suite has everything you're looking for. That's painful, time consuming and plain boring. To be honest, it's hard to understand how come we still have to do these things manually in 2010.

My idea is to simply set up a website on which users could set up an account and make a list of the features they need their flat to have and enter a physical perimeter in order to delimit the boundaries in which the apartment should be. That website would do all the fetching from the most popular house and apartment listings to then deliver the relevant results by email. Just like Google alert, users should have the choice to receive emails as the ads are published (live) or as a digest every day or week.