Finding the ideal apartment (Like a Hacker)

2018, the year I decided to head to Europe to open an açaí franchise (which didn't work out), was also the beginning of my experience with remote work and "digital nomadism".

While things weren't coming together to get the franchise off the ground, I kept working as a Digital Marketing freelancer (while learning to code in my free time).

At the end of the year, when I came back from Europe to Brazil, I turned that freelance gig into my "official" bread and butter with Traktor. I came back here and started traveling, spending a bit of time in each place.

And since then, I haven't stayed in any one home for more than three months straight.

This life has plenty of upsides, and I'm fully aware that being able to live it is a huge privilege.

But there comes a point when it gets tiring. At least for me, it did.

I miss simple things, like not having to worry about a place to keep my books and records.

Being able to keep a fixed routine. (I couldn't pull that off while traveling). Being able to scale.

Every time I change cities, I have to start everything from scratch.

All of that, plus other personal factors, led me to a decision: I'm going to stop being a digital nomad!

It's not a final decision, I might change my mind. But I want to spend at least a year in the same place and see if I feel better that way, putting down roots in one city.

Which brings us to the main topic of this article: finding the ideal apartment after so much time hopping from place to place.

Like a hacker.

#1 - Defining the specs

I've spent plenty of time in flats and one-bedroom apartments over the last few years.

This time, I want a bigger apartment, with plenty of room for a guest bedroom and an office.

Furnishing a rented apartment is also something I'm not too inclined to do, so it has to come with at least the basics, like wardrobes and a kitchen.

I've also discovered that I love taking care of plants, and space for a little vegetable garden (even a vertical one) is very welcome - which means I have to worry about sunlight too.

I also want two bathrooms and a gas-heated shower, because I'm in Curitiba and it's cold as hell here.

Beyond that, I don't want an apartment waaaay out in the sticks - but I'm not dead set on being super central either. So I'm filtering for the following neighborhoods: Portão, Vila Izabel, Água Verde, Batel, Campina do Siqueira, Bigorrilho, Alto da Glória, Alto da XV, Centro, Centro Cívico, Rebouças.

Finally, one of the most important things: I'd like to pay up to R$2000 a month, rent and building fees combined. I could stretch that budget a little if I found the perfect apartment. But I'd rather not.

So, my specs are the following:

• 2 or 3 bedrooms
• 2 bathrooms
• gas-heated shower
• more than 50m² of usable area
• 3-4 hours of sunlight
• furnished
• in one of the neighborhoods listed above
• up to R$2000 in total cost

So let the search begin!

#2 - Searching the obvious places

Like anyone would, the first thing I did when I decided I wanted an apartment was search Google for: Apartment Rentals in Curitiba.

If there's a bloodthirsty SEO market out there, it's this one. I know I looked at all the biggest portals (Imovelweb, Vivareal, Zap imoveis, Quinto Andar);

I had a lot of trouble properly filtering listings on those platforms. I figured that would've been solved by now.

A special shout-out for horrible usability goes to Zap Imóveis, which asks you to share your location on EVERY page. NO MEANS NO, ZAP.

Anyway, I needed to evaluate the apartments available on those platforms.

Using the filters (keeping in mind that the furniture filter isn't reliable, and neither is the gas shower one), I got the following number of apartments on each platform:

• Imovelweb: 130 apartments
• Vivareal: 73 apartments
• Zap: 46 apartments
• QuintoAndar: 4 apartments

Among those, QuintoAndar has the best listings, but the highest prices. To give you an idea, if I raise the budget to R$3000, there are 18 apartments. I guess that's justified by the perks of renting through them.

Now, to evaluate which platform is the best, I'm going to need a little trick 🤠. Scrapers.

Extracting the data from the platforms

Using Simplescraper.io I quickly extracted the data from Imovelweb, Vivareal and Zap to run a quick analysis of the kind of listings I'd find there.

It looks like Imovelweb lists bigger, more expensive places - even its average total price blew past my budget. Vivareal landed on a decent average, and Zap seems to have apartments that are needlessly expensive for their square footage.

I looked through all the options on those three sites and found some interesting ones... But nothing I fell in love with. All the really good places were expensive.

But one thing really got me suspicious...

I found almost no listings from the small local real estate agencies. And they usually have nice places listed.

#3 - Striking Gold

When I first moved to Curitiba, in 2016, I rented a place through a small agency, Firenze.

That was the first place I went looking.

And... right off the bat, I found 23 listings matching the specs I wanted!

via GIPHY

Great. Now, I just need to find a way to list every local real estate agency, and then their listings...

And I'll find the perfect apartment at one of them.

Super simple, right?

Finding every local real estate agency

For that, I went to the place where you can find almost every small business. Google. More specifically, Google Maps.

And sure enough, in the areas where I'm looking, I found at least 200 real estate agencies.

Now... How do I aggregate all this information the easy way?

Since I'm not crazy enough to build a Google Maps scraper on my own, I used Phantombuster - Google Maps Search Export.

Easy peasy. 200 agencies, sorted by neighborhood, with websites, in a spreadsheet.

Now, I need to process this information.

That's going to be a real challenge, since every site will be unique, and I have a feeling a lot of them will be badly built.

Since the process of choosing an apartment also has a lot to do with an incalculable qualitative factor - how much you like it - it's a bit hard to automate this part.

But there's no decision a good Excel spreadsheet can't help us make!

I manually went through the websites of 28 agencies and manually rated the listings I liked most. It took a few hours, but it looks like I found four places that check every box and are within budget!

Success!

Wrapping up the saga

I still haven't settled on one of these apartments. I'm going to ask a few friends for their opinions, and after that, contact the agencies.
See if anyone can offer a special deal too.

I learned a few things along the way:

• The best value-for-money apartments are the hardest to find (obviously!)
• Real estate agencies work as a network - several of them have the same listings on more than one site.
• The real estate market is nowhere near offering a pleasant digital experience yet. Over the day I spent doing this, I managed to think of 2 or 3 business models that would make sense in this space.

Thanks for reading this far, and if you have any suggestions, send me a hello! :)