5 Smartphone Apps To Use When Looking For An Apartment - Finding a place to live can be a challenging experience,
especially if you’re in a stiff market without a lot of vacancy. You’ll want to
use every possible advantage while you’re scouring the streets, and one tool
that can definitely come in handy is your smartphone. If you’ll be on the
apartment hunt anytime soon, here are 5 apps that you can certainly benefit
from:
MagicPlan
In today’s fast-paced online rental market, apartment
listings that are uploaded in moments by landlords and property managers may
not always have the most accurate facts, and nowhere is this more evident than
the listed square footage of a place. If you have doubts that the
munchkin-sized studio you’re currently standing in is really 600 square feet,
the MagicPlan app can help set the record straight. It works by analyzing the
photos of a room you take with your smartphone’s camera, then spits out a good
approximation of the size in seconds.
Sketchbook Mobile
You may find yourself needing to make some quick notes and
sketches when pondering how you’d place your furniture in a potential home.
Sketchbook Mobile is a very passable drawing and painting program that is well
suited to the smaller screens of most smartphones.
Craigslist Mobile
If you’re currently searching for an apartment, you’ve
probably looked at Craigslist hundreds of times already. But considering how
quickly new rentals can be added—and then gobbled up by super-responsive
tenants—you’ll want to always be able to check out the latest listings on the
go. If the place you’ve got an appointment for doesn’t pan out, there may be a
dozen more rentals in your area that were added to Craigslist in the last hour.
Evernote
One of the greatest all-purpose cloud systems out there,
Evernote is always useful when you’re going to be doing a bit of research on
the web. The mobile version lets you link to apartment listings, add notes,
paste photos and attachments, and basically gives you a digital clipboard that
fits in your pocket.
Parking Meter Pro
If you’re touring various apartments all day long—especially
in overly crowded urban areas—you’re going to end up doing a lot of creative
parking. Unless you want to pay the tab for 4 or 5 different parking garages
that day, odds are that you’ll be hunting for the perfect meter that isn’t too
far away.
Parking Meter Pro gives you a pin on your GPS map right
where the meter is, ensuring that you’ll always be able to find your way back
to your car again. You can also synch a timer with the meter, with several
different alerts to let you know when your time is almost up. If you do end up
parking in an hourly garage, you can set this app to notify you when you reach
another pay interval, letting you cut your apartment visit short if you need to
get back before another $9.99 charge rolls around.
These apps will help you as you throw elbows against the
thousands of other renters out there, and will hopefully keep your apartment
search from driving you crazy as you find a new home.
Author bio:
John is a blogger who usually enjoys looking for new
apartments, except for the occasional listing that says “cozy” when it really
means “the size of a tollbooth.” He writes for insurance company
Protect Your Bubble, who can give you the renters insurance needed to
protect the stuff in your new place.
