By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
April 1998

The current batch of apartment-finder Web sites isn't bad – you can pick, roughly, where you want to live, how much you're willing to pay and which amenities (balcony, fireplace, parking, etc.) you can't live without before hitting the "search" button. Thing is, only the big boys, the mega-high rises, have Web-ified the kind of information you need when you're looking for the ideal place to hang your hat.

The online version of the free print publication Apartments for Rent does best at taking advantage of the Web; its hook is MapQuest screens of neighborhoods, which highlight nearby shopping, transportation and other points of interest – useful stuff.

The other big online apartment-finder, Rent.Net focuses mainly on the 'burbs – you can't even search the District by quadrant here (when what's really needed is the ability to search by neighborhood). It has a few more listings than Apartments for Rent, plus some non-interactive maps and a "salary calculator" that purports to show how much cash you'd need to maintain your current standard of living in other cities.

So what would I tell my cousin to use if she decides to move to D.C. but wants to start looking from Atlanta? The Post's own classified ads have the advantage of sheer numbers of ads to pick through (they include scarcer items, like condos put up for rent, that Rent.Net and its ilk miss). But as you move past the ads for the luxury apartments (to where the real bargains are, right?) the ads get more cryptic and less informative. And looking for apartments in a particular neighborhood is no easier than on the other two Web sites.

Ideally, every one of these ads would link to some MapQuest cartography – no, ideally, I would be able to enter my friends' (and my favorite bars' and bookstores') addresses as part of my search. If I can use the Web to find the fun places, why can't I use it to find a place to live where the fun places are? Until then, even desk potatoes will have to work the ol' shoe leather sometimes.