HotPads Daily :: The Official Blog of HotPads.com

HotPads--Fashion's latest designer!

While HotPads has always been the place to find your place, soon it will be the place to find your  WARDROBE too!?  Due to the numerous requests we've gotten for HotPads material, we have decided to begin selling things through our site. Our talented team of designers is hard at work creating the new line of t-shirts that will be available to the public and are sure to be all the rage.  Granted, before HotPads mania can sweep the fashion nation, we have to actually make the shirts. 

Here's the problem: I lied, our "talented team of designers" isn't exactly talented...or really designers... or actually even a team (if a team implies more than just me). So, all you fashion-conscious, creative, or just plain funny HotPaders- now is the time to awaken your inner fashionista! 

This is a challenge, a competition, a battle for t-shirt dominance... aka a CONTEST.  We want your ideas for the message, design, and style of  the new HotPads t-shirts- they can be humorous, cocky, straightforward, or any other adjective of your choice.  We will judge each design based on these criteria: a) that we like it, b) that people will want to wear it , and c) that it will effectively promote HotPads. The person who submits the selected entry will win three (3) of the HotPads shirts that bear their design, as evidence of the fulfilment of their latent desire for style stardom.

Please submit all entries to me at CCorgan@hotpads.com

- tip: make sure to include our logo-

Bubble Trouble?

Despite reports of a slowing for-sale market here in DC, from the narrow confines of HotPads HQ, rental prices have seemed fairly stagnant (if this is not true in your case, let us know about it). Will growing demand and low vacancy rates translate into increased rents?  Whatever happens, we’ll have front row seats.

An "A" For Effort

When starting a company, excitement and energy are bountiful.  This creates the opportunity to get a lot done in a short amount of time. It is during the first three months of operations that we made the largest strides, developing a plan to build a comprehensive, user-friendly rental housing search engine and listing service.

While this energy is a large reason it is so rewarding to work for a start-up, it can often get misdirected.

The current Heat Wave we are experiencing in DC reminds me of one of HotPads' largest boondoggles.  In an effort to create a comprehensive database of rental housing to launch the site with, we decided we should take a picture of every rental property in DC.

Mainly on the weekends, we enlisted friends, parents, siblings, and unsuspecting computer engineers to schlep around the city  taking pictures of every single rental house, garden apartment, apartment community, and many...MANY homes that probably have never donned the"For Rent" sign in the window.

We spent the two hottest months of the year working in this fashion.  It was hot.  REALLY REALLY HOT. We walked down each street with a clipboard and camera.  If the homeowner was working in the yard as we snapped a pic, they would inevitable scowl and confront us about our activities.  I don't blame them, if I saw a bunch of sweaty sunburned people taking a picture of my house, I would want a question or two answered.  There were a lot of uncomfortable conversations.

After completing about 20% of the city, we said to ourselves, "WHAT ARE WE DOING?!?!?"  We finally came to our senses, we were torturing ourselves over something that really does not add much value to the site. There was no way to scale what were doing in DC to other markets and there was no reason to.  Housing shoppers not only want a picture and location of available housing....but they need availability, price, and amenities.

Everything was not lost, we learned a great deal during the process, for instance, the need to develop a truly efficient means of gathering content on a large scale.  Plus, we had plenty of pictures and addresses to plug into our prototype to test our software...and we all lost about ten pounds.

I have attached a map of all the properties we didn't get to in DC if anyone has some spare time on their hands.

Well, what else is new?

HotPads is just improving by the minute. Besides the list of technological improvements mentioned, I have added a few informational pages to HotPads.

1.) Frequently Asked Questions Page

Having a FAQ page means that HotPads users are now just a click away from getting help.  With a detailed list of questions separated into different categories, any potential problems now all have solutions.

2.) About Page

Are you interested in learning more about HotPads? The newly linked About page provides a brief history of HotPads and how it started. Plus, valuable contact information is listed as well. This page is just an informal introduction to the HotPads founders and the rest of the team. Now, it’s your turn to introduce yourselves through this blog!

3.) Press Page

This was created for those interested in seeing what others have to say about HotPads.

With these pages that add to our main search site, HotPads (and hopefully its users too) is more complete. Please let me know what you think or if you have any questions.  Now, please enjoy while you peruse the newest HotPads pages!

Domers in the News?

We appreciate the shout out HotPads received from our alma mater in Notre Dame Magazine.  In a liberal use of the term "news," Matt, Doug, Tim, and I were mentioned in the "Domers in the News" section.  Good for HotPads . . . Bad for news!

Thanks Notre Dame Magazine!

Real Estate

I've been trying to keep my desktop organized for a year.  Need more screen real estate.  I actually have a new computer in the mail which should resolve this problem before it really gets out of control.  If anyone (excluding john) has a better background, please send it to me ASAP.

A Rose By Any Other Name

A lot of people ask, "What has been the hardest part about starting a company?" Sometimes, visions of early software development flash before my eyes or the excruciatingly long process of raising capital.

But in the end, I have to go back to the five months it took us to pick a name for the website.

It seems like a fairly easy thing to do, pick a name for a website, but its not.

We wanted to pick something that was memorable, fun, related to real estate…and AVAILABLE. This was a very difficult combination of attributes and our brainstorming often got side-tracked. Here are some examples of hundreds from a May 2005 email:

IntelliRent, PadPod, Apartmentals, CoyoteRentals, Hiddenunits, Apartnation, Rentbug, Popcornrentals, ApartMint, ConglomeRent, RentTarget, HoodPicker, and RenterCenter.

(I think IntelliRent was my idea. It still holds a special place in my heart.)

Our consensus changed on a weekly basis.

After a great deal of painful deliberation, we finally settled on the "perfect" name: RenterCenter. It was kind of catchy (i.e. it rhymed), it related to real estate, and no one was actively using it.

However, after a few weeks of calling ourselves RenterCenter….we found that the domain, while not actively used, was definitely owned, and the owner wanted a princely sum (enough to buy a house in my home town).

So to our chagrin we had to move on. (luckily....)

We started brainstorming again, and a clever woman named Mouse suggested HotPads.com. With that name she had hit on something…  We were not approaching real estate search and listing like a "RenterCenter" or an "Intellirent."  We were taking a new, innovative, and user-focused approach, and it deserved a more creative, friendly, and fitting name.  If our users finish their housing search believing that they have found a "Hot Pad," then we could not be more pleased. 

It took us a bit to warm up to it…but once it settled into our brains, we could think of no other more suitable name.

When hearing HotPads.com for the first time, people often do a double-take, but just as it happened to us, once it settles…it never escapes.

- Douglas (my brother calls me Fresh)

15,000 and Counting!

At HotPads, we want to provide our users with an easy way to search through a comprehensive offering of detailed rental home, apartment community, rental condo, sublet, and find a roommate listings.

When HotPads launched last November, we had only a handful of listings, and they were all in our home town, Washington, DC. We had a long way to go before HotPads could live up to the slogan “the place to find your place.”

But, by being free-to-list so that anyone with a place to rent has the opportunity to showcase it to our users, HotPads’ listing base has snowballed, growing to over 15,000 active listings!  We’ve still got a long way to go, but with this growth, many cities are becoming dense with housing options, the way we envisioned when we started the site: New York; Washington, DC; and Dallas (please . . . check’em out).

HotPads Enhancements

We launched several enhancements to the site. These enhancements may not make you ooooh and ahhh, but they have significantly improved the user experience. We are excited about them, but admittedly, that does not take much. We are continually trying to make improvements and appreciate your feedback on the site! Here are a few of our new features:

1) Dynamic Summary Squares - Our summary squares show the number of listings
in a particular area when listings are too dense to display on the map.  Now, as the user narrows his/her search results, the summary squares adjust accordingly or disappear when the density of listings becomes small enough.  This important feature can be best expcerienced in NYC.

2)  Three New Zoom Levels - We have launched three new layers of the map.  One layer is a new closest zoom level, about a four block radius.  For now you can only see this level in our most dense areas of NYC and DC.  The two other new levels are an intermdiate level to make zooming in on houses more seamless and a new top layer (this is a pretty one).

3)  Bouncy Icons - As you view the listing details of a porperty the property's icon bounces up and down.  Not only is this feature cute, but also helps housing shoppers identify the property that he/she recently clicked on.

4) Re-centering Preview - If you click on an icon at the bottom or right of the map, instead of the preview bubble being hidden, the map re-centers so that the entire bubble is visible.

5) Help Bubble - The first time a user visits the map on HotPads, a Help Bubble is displayed on the map.  This will hopefully help users get the gist of the site quickly.

-Douglas (Its my birthday)

HotPads is Inman Innovator Award Finalist

Inman News announced that HotPads is a finalist for the prestigious Inman Innovator Award! HotPads is one of five companies nominated for Most Innovative Rental/ New Home Online Service, along with CityCribs, RentClicks, MyNewPlace, and Rent.com/eBay.

The winners of the 2006 Inman Innovator Award will be honored at a ceremony on July 26th during the Real Estate Connect San Francisco conference, where Matt will be representing HotPads.

HotPads is honored to have been recognized for this award!

Here is the official press release.

- HotPads' Team