App Smart Extra: Looking for Real Estate Rentals - NYTimes.com

Town houses, family homes, apartments for rent or land to buy ? these are the topics of this week?s App Smart, which covers apps that help you find a new home.

Much more dynamic than a mere hunt through the printouts at a Realtor?s office, apps can search out potential properties in a given area and present you with all the various options in an interactive list.

Several specialized apps are aimed at renters.

A simplified version of the full Trulia property-finding app, for example, just deals with rental properties. Available free for iOS and Android, this app presents you with a map view of available rental properties that match the settings you enter for property type, number of bedrooms and price range. Map markers are color-coded for at-a-glance info: Green means the property was added to the database in the last 24 hours, gray means you?ve already checked out the details, and black means the listing is older but you haven?t checked it out. Since the rental market can move swiftly in some places, this could be useful. Don?t expect too many bells and whistles from this app, but if you?re looking for a home to rent, it can probably help make some early decisions.

Zillow Rentals is a similar, rental-only version of the full Zillow property-finder map that has a slightly more icon-based interface. It?s also less about showing you data on a map and more about presenting you with potential rental properties in a list ? which may or may not suit the way your mind works. The app is free on iOS and Android.

Various real estate companies have their own apps, of course, and RE/MAX Real Estate Search is a good example?(free on iOS, Android). It?s just as feature-rich as the other apps mentioned, and it?s designed to be fairly easy to use thanks to clear icon and menu options. It?s really for properties that are for sale, rather than for rent, and it?s mainly designed to tell you about properties that RE/MAX has on its own books.

?Realtor.com Real Estate ? Homes for sale and rent? is another free app of this type for iOS and Android. It offers features that match many of its peers, and is just as easy to use, but it?s advertised with the promise that ?90% of listings updated every 15 minutes? and all the rest are updated ?at least once per day.? If you?re in a hurry to find a home, or you?re looking in a popular area where properties don?t stay on the market for long, this may be useful to you.

Remember, too, that despite the fact these apps offer rich data on the specifications of rental or purchase properties you may be interested in, they simply won?t beat a visit in person, where you can get a feel for the area and perhaps chat to potential neighbors. App technology hasn?t quite progressed that far yet!

Quick call

The new Calendars By Readdle app, free on iOS, is a stab at replacing Apple?s own Calendar app on iPads and iPhones. It syncs with Google calendar and Apple?s calendar. And it?s certainly more colorful, thanks to color-coded event markers which may remind you, at a glance, what you?re up to on a particular week or day. It also includes SMS reminders for events, which Readdle thinks is better than built-in ?push? notifications.

Source: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/app-smart-extra-looking-for-real-estate-rentals/

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