Saturday, June 27, 2009

Apartment listings: ur doin it wrong

For the purposes of a blog post, I was trying to figure out how much a three-bedroom apartment goes for in Toronto. So I went to a rentals website, searched for three-bedroom apartments in Toronto, and sorted the results by price, lowest to highest.

The first page was full of results that were impossibly low. Literally impossible - it wouldn't cover the property taxes on that property. So I clicked on some of these listings, and discovered that they were in fact for one bedroom in someone's house. They'd just listed it that way because it's a three-bedroom house. WTF?? Has it not occurred to these would-be landlords that the tenants are looking for how many bedrooms they'll get, not how many you have?

So I proceeded past these into higher prices. This set of prices looked reasonable for a one-bedroom in Toronto, but surely you can't get a three-bedroom for that little? If you can, my current and last apartments are egregiously over-charging, even taking into account that this is a better neighbourhood. So again I clicked on some listings that were representative of this price range, and found that they are listings for the entire building. Suites from bachelor to three-bedroom were available, and they'd indicated only the lowest of the range of prices, under "Starting from...". That's totally unhelpful. If I actually needed a three-bedroom apartment, I'd need to know how much the three-bedrooms go for.

Between these two issues, I went through six pages of useless information before I gave up. And I'm not even looking for an apartment, I just want to know about how much they cost!

No comments: