Businesses have sprang up to help people find apartments, so it is possible to outsource your apartment hunt too, but it costs much more than 90$.
I am actually surprised that, given that housing is a basic human need, there is no mass-market apartment-finding company that takes all the horrible awkward work out of finding an apartment and makes it easy and convenient. I've no idea how you'd do it - maybe build entire neighbourhoods based on typical lifestyle choice sets and market those individually. Maybe something like that exists in the US? I've never seen someone successfully do that in Europe.
Do you have some sort of rent control or other laws in place keeping people from raising prices? If 20 people want an apartment, one of them would usually be willing to pay $50 or $100 more per month to get the place. These kinds of shortages were a big problem in Los Angeles and New York until they relaxed rent control.
Offering to pay more rent than advertised is a good idea, I might try that.
In Germany there is for instance http://www.immobilienscout24.de and some more websites like it (although the same offers end up on nearly every one of them). The search options there are more finely tuned than on lets say http://www.apartments.com. Also the larger newspapers (for instance http://immobilienmarkt.sueddeutsche.de/) have often own search engines for places to rent or buy.
Not only is this a good idea online, you can also hire domestic (local) concierge services to run errands for you during the day. My mother-in-law successfully runs such a business.
2600 magazine recently had an article about a Bayesian filter for getting the spam out of the "w4m" section. A human could weed out rejections, spambots, and prostitutes, putting the rest into a sortable spreadsheet.
Er, no, this is clearly a job for a real-estate-specific website with a search form. The part that only a human can do is to actually visit the apartments but you can't outsource that, at least not to a remote person.
Now, why in the world do people use craigslist by default instead of a better website? It should be beneficial to tenants -- who will save time and money -- and to landlords and agencies, who will gladly pay a fee to list their properties.
If there was a better free website, I'd use that; but it would have to be hugely better than Craigslist for me to open my wallet.
However, there are some niggles at the back of my mind - or perhaps a little Stallman on my shoulder. Translated into UK pounds $3 per hour would certainly be below minimum wage. Is it really a good idea to encourage people to lock themselves into poverty wages? If I can satisfy myself that I'm not actually creating more poverty then perhaps this strategy is worth trying.
Having been in the same boat many times, I got tired of spreadsheets and hacked up this site. Would love any feedback or comments.
Sort of along the same vein of how designers formed an ad hoc association of how they felt regarding spec-work and design centric crowdsourcing sites like 99designs.
Does anyone have any articles on this?
There might be some way to make it work, though.
