Essential Online Tools and Guides for Efficient Apartment Hunting

Finding an apartment used to mean reading newspaper ads and driving around town to check out potential places to live. These days, apartment websites exist to make the search easy and convenient. These are our favorite apartment-finding sites to help you select the perfect new dwelling at the right price.

01

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Rent.com: All the Filters You Could Ask For

What We Like

• Built-in Moving Center supplies free moving quotes.
• Nearly a dozen filters for square footage, pets, amenities, and more.
• Estimates utility costs.

What We Don’t Like

• The selection of apartments is smaller than some sites.
• Many listings are for apartment complexes with multiple units available.
• Annoying ‘contact’ buttons in the way.

Rent.com offers a wide variety of search filters. For example, search for pet-friendly apartments, properties with utilities included, and apartments with features such as air conditioning, washer/dryer connections, oversized closets, or fiber availability.

Some extra useful tools you get at Rent.com include a calculator to determine how much rent you can afford, “what to know” articles about moving to various cities, and a walkability score for each apartment.

Visit Rent.com

02

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Zumper: Most Price-Sensitive Apartment Hunting Site

What We Like

• Unique search filters, like income-restricted housing and no security deposit.

What We Don’t Like

• Details vary considerably from one apartment to the next.

Zumper is especially sensitive to pricing considerations. For instance, the site presents median rental prices for specific cities, the map view shows sample prices for rentals throughout a selected area, and it’s easy to restrict the results to cheap or luxury housing. There’s also a filter for deals to help you find specials, price drops, and apartments that include utilities in the rent or wave the security deposit.

Visit Zumper

03

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ForRent.com: Loads of Details and Reviews

What We Like

• Offers helpful resources such as an apartment rental checklist.

What We Don’t Like

• Most listings are from large management companies.

This apartment finder provides precise information about apartment complexes. Beyond a detailed overview of property features such as pet policies and proximity to shopping, most listings include lots of photos, virtual tours, detailed floor plans, drive time to nearby schools, nearby apartments, renter reviews, and more.

Something else you might like about this site is the calculator that helps you find apartments based on what you can afford. Give it your monthly income and the percentage of that income that you’re willing to spend on rent, and the website will do the rest.

Visit ForRent.com

04

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Hotpads: Most Feature-Packed Apartment Finder

What We Like

• Commute details for people who work nearby.
• Track listings for price drop alerts.
• Highlights verified listings.
• Contact the property without a user account.

What We Don’t Like

• Filters are more plentiful on some other sites.

During your search, this feature-rich apartment search engine shows a map of the area alongside a list view. In the map view, select building icons to see details and photos of specific apartment listings. Photos also include Google Street View.

The filters on this site are incredibly helpful. Define the move-in date, amenities you want (including gated entry and doorman), square footage, type (rooms for rent, regular, sublet, or corporate), special restrictions like income restricted or student housing, price, bed and bath count, and pet allowances. Additionally, Hotpads makes it easy to find the most recent listings and apartments with certain words in the listing, like pool or restaurant.

If you register with the site, listings can be saved as favorites and you can revisit contacted properties. Quick signup is made possible through an Apple, Facebook, or Google account.

Visit Hotpads

05

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Apartments.com: Best Apartment Website If You’re Bilingual

What We Like

• Locate apartments based on your ideal commute time.
• Find rentals based on your budget.
• Displays the estimated average rent for the area you’re interested in.

What We Don’t Like

• Neighborhood guides aren’t available for all areas.

Available in both English and Spanish, Apartments.com provides extensive apartment listings, allowing you to be highly specific in your searches. For example, search for cheap apartment rentals, luxury properties, or elevator buildings.

By default, you receive a map view that lets you draw to specify the borders for your geographic search. Results can be sorted by price, last updated, 3D tour, and video. We also like the style filter that finds duplexes, new construction, and apartment complexes with fewer than 50 units.

Visit Apartments.com

06

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Craiglist: One of the Best Websites to Find Apartments Worldwide

What We Like

• Includes a decent set of filters to find listing with pictures, EV charging, laundry, parking, etc.
• User accounts are unnecessary; listing include a custom email address instead.

What We Don’t Like

• Old-fashioned UI by today’s standards.
• You might come across duplicate listings and some rental scams.

A longtime go-to for apartment seekers, Craigslist offers numerous listings through its local sites worldwide. Many listings are reasonably priced apartments from smaller landlords.

Craigslist delivers a list view, but property owners and agents can opt to post location maps and photo and video tours of the apartment. Dates for open houses are also easy to find.

This site’s apartment searching features include all the normal filters you’d expect, like price and bed/bath, but also square footage, weekly or daily rent period, specific parking (detached garage, valet, street, carport, etc.), and listings that have images or that were posted today.

Visit Craigslist

07

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Apartment Guide: Best for Getting a Virtual Tour of Apartment Complexes

What We Like

• Shows projected monthly costs.
• Easy to find similar properties.
• Contextually aware for locating nearby interests.

What We Don’t Like

• Most listings are for apartment complexes from large management companies.

If you like to know about the layout and amenities before setting foot in your prospective apartment, Apartment Guide could be for you. Many listings include a 3D tour that lets you walk through all the rooms.

Apartment Guide is chock-full of filters for price, bedrooms and bathrooms, the pet policy, minimum square feet, disability access, elevator, fireplace, and loads more. Search an entire state or by nearby colleges or military bases.

Visit Apartment Guide

08

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RentHop: Best Apartment-Finder Website for Urban Dwellers

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What We Like

• Each listing comes with very well informed property and neighborhood profiles, right down to names of specific stores and restaurants nearby.
• Offers price comparisons with similar apartments in the neighborhood.

What We Don’t Like

• This website only serves map metro areas in the U.S.

If you’re moving to a big U.S. city, conducting highly granular apartment searches on RentHop for virtually any neighborhood is a breeze. Search through a list view, but the site’s drag-and-zoom-enabled map interface is more fun.

RentHop also gives each apartment a HopScore based on the freshness and quality of the listing and the property manager’s reputation. However, a HopScore lower than 95 percent is seemingly rare.

Some of the unique features let you search for rentals with no broker fee, a private outdoor space, an office, and a storage facility.

Download for:

Visit RentHop

09

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## [PadMapper: Most Map-Happy Website](https://www.padmapper.com/)

What We Like

• Can hide listings you’re not interested in.
• Less cluttered than similar sites.
• Find long-term and short-term rentals.

What We Don’t Like

• Apartment listings not as abundant as they used to be now that Craigslist listings are no longer included.
• Fewer search filters than other sites.

PadMapper uses listings from websites like ApartmentGuide to create comprehensive rental maps. In addition, landlords can use the app to post listings directly to PadMapper. Listings are also available for Canada.

The map is simple to use and all your filtering options exist off to the side for quick manipulation of the map.

Visit PadMapper

10

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Virtual Assistant: Your Voice Search Alternative

What We Like

• Get results quickly, whether asking for “apartments near me” or rentals in another city.

What We Don’t Like

• Search results will likely be limited to apartment finding websites, realtors, and big apartment complexes.

If you’re not big on data entry or you like to play around with virtual assistants, try using Google Assistant orSiri to search for apartments. If you’re using Google’s assistant, for example, it will locate a few of the top results and pull data from Google Maps to give you a quick summary.

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