Sunday, April 28, 2013

5 Smartphone Apps To Use When Looking For An Apartment

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.