If you’ve ever moved abroad or to a city you don’t know much about, you know how difficult it is to find a flat in advance. If you haven’t, well you can imagine. The problems are - you don’t know what the areas are like, it’s difficult to compare prices and looking at a list of available properties doesn’t give an overview of where they are located. If it is in another country with another language it makes it even more difficult.
Cristian Suazo, a dear friend of mine, has been working on homein.com, a property rental and property sales site for quite some time which aims to solve these problems. I have known about it for quite some time but the other day I stumbled upon a Spanish article about it that made me have another look. It really is a brilliant service!
The unique feature is that all properties are marked on a map, so you can immediately see where it is located. Each property marker has a colour representing a price level, hovering the mouse pointer over a marker shows the price. You can set a filter so that only flats within your budget are displayed.
At the moment the serivice is only available for a handful cities in Spain, namely - Barcelona, Madrid, Mallorca, Marbella, Costa Brava, Sant Cugat and Sant Just. I hope they roll this out for other locations around the world. If this had been available for the cities I’ve moved to and within, it would have saved me a lot of time and money!
ian
