Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012 and describes the Spanish rental market during the crisis and Mapitat, then a new startup that no longer appears to operate. Map-based property search has since become standard on the main property portals.
The rental business is moving quite a lot of money during this crisis. If we add to that the growing number of online property portals, we could have a profitable startup idea. In this case, an idea that could be imported into Spain is the search model offered by Mapitat.
This US startup shows promise, even though it only operates in Toronto and San Francisco. Mapitat offers an easy search: on the platform, users can set a search radius within an area and filter the type of flat they want by price, number of bedrooms, garage, services in the area, and so on.
Often, when we dive into property search portals, we find that some have an interface that’s complicated to use, and others simply have hardly any filters, so we have to spend hours searching for properties. With a platform like this, once we’ve set our filters, all the properties with the features we asked for appear on a Google map.
If someone managed to make this idea work and the platform reached a considerable number of visits and searches, this kind of “tool” is exactly the sort that tends to be bought by tech giants. Make no mistake: in time, companies the size of Google (or Google itself) will try to conquer the online property market, since Google has the perfect tools to develop it (Google Maps, Google Street View, and so on).
Featured image: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
