If Only You Could Search by "Non-Crazy Roommates"

By Olivia Leigh in Miscellaneous on May 8, 2007 4:04PM

A new Google maps mashup seems to be rolled out every week, with everything from places to find your drink of choice to the best bike routes magically cropping up on the internet atlas of choice.

However, thanks to Apartment Therapy: San Francisco, we found what might be our favorite merger yet: Housingmaps.com, a site that plots craigslist apartment listings on the map.

After choosing a city, you can select to search for apartments, rooms, sublets, or condos and houses for sales. Further narrow your choices with additional search criteria to find a place within your price range, a chez that will accommodate Fluffy or Rex, or an abode with an additional room for your office. Another bonus? Photo previews allow you to see if that listing that sounds a bit too affordable is up to par before you click over to craigslist.

While the program looks like it could use a little tweaking (searching for a room in the $250-$750 range with keyword “Ukrainian Village” yielded no results, despite one of the listings having “Ukrainian Village” in the description), we still think this has the potential to be a great service. We’ve been craigslist apartment hunters for years, ever since our first foray into living in a strange city during college. When you may not be familiar with all the obscure neighborhoods a city has (and goodness knows Chicago has many), seeing potential dwellings laid out on the map is infinitely helpful.