App City: Navigating the New York Rental Market Jungle

So Mr. DeMenthon created PadMapper, a Web site that turns each listing into a plot point on a map. It clearly spoke to a problem that extended beyond Mr. DeMenthon’s own search. The Web site now receives millions of hits a month, and PadMapper’s free smartphone app has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

PadMapper’s success shows how much room for improvement there is in the way New Yorkers look for apartments and how difficult it will be to make the search easier.

One major problem: the information available to potential renters is simply not very good. Rental listings rarely include much about the landlords, and many listings exist not to convey any real information but to lure potential clients into the offices of brokers, who will then show them whatever spaces they are trying to unload that day. When I looked at my street on PadMapper, for instance, there were three listings supposedly advertising three different apartments along a 10-block stretch, each described in almost identical language.

This problem is not a secret, and nascent projects like InsideDigs and RentHackr are trying to get renters to cooperate to solve it.

“I rented my first apartment through Craigslist, and now it’s all brokers, it’s all bait-and-switch; you never get good information,” said Sharif Fakhr, the creator of InsideDigs, a Web site. On the site, renters exchange information about how they like their apartments and when they are moving out. (Mr. Fakhr is also working on a mobile app that he plans to release this year.)

The idea is that renters will work cooperatively to find and lease apartments. Similarly, on RentHackr, users share what they are paying for their apartments and if they plan to move soon.

The trick, as it always is with projects like these, is getting enough people involved. To see what other tenants are saying on InsideDigs, users must post information about their own apartments or pay $20. Most opt to post data about their apartments. The listings are unusual in that they discuss apartments that will be available several months ahead of time and acknowledge their too-small bedrooms or lack of sunlight or closets. Of course, the apartments surreptitiously listed by the dozens of real estate brokers that Mr. Fakhr has to remove from the site each month ostensibly have no shortcomings.

It would be nice to see projects like these succeed, but they clearly still have a ways to go.

Spending a week thinking about the woes of the New York City renter had me indulging in a fantasy of mine, in which I strike it rich, buy a place and am done with this mess once and for all. An app called HomeSnap can help with such daydreaming. When you take a photograph of a house with the app — free for iPhone — it uses GPS information to find out how much the property is worth by checking tax records and other databases. If it is for sale, the app can connect you with a real estate agent.

HomeSnap seems like a suburban app, since it is based on houses rather than apartment buildings. Sawbuck, the real estate company that designed it, says it is working on an update that would offer some information about the apartments in multifamily buildings, but it acknowledges that is a much stiffer challenge. (The current version couldn’t even tell me the market value of the six-unit building I live in.)

The app worked well when I took it for a test run among the tightly packed row houses in my neighborhood. Of course, it served only as an efficient way to douse my dreams with cold water. HomeSnap informed me, quite credibly, that even the smallest and homeliest of the houses nearby were far beyond my reach.

Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips via e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @joshuabrustein.