1) It only returns 19 results for Somerville
2) None of them allow cats (really? Every apartment I've lived in Somerville was more than happy to have cats).
3) There is no option to search for ones with garages (yes, there are garages in Somerville!)
4) There is no feedback as to where this Hop Score comes from (freshness, quality, manager? How do they know who a good landlord is?)
I'm not sure what this does for me honestly over other services. It looks nice. But 3 years, MIT developers and funding don't seem to add up here.
Fundamentally, the problem of indexing information about apartments is still broken completely, and no one seems to be able to fix it.
For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data partners and our NYC models. We'll be sure our scoring gets smarter and better fit to Boston over time.
The map UI is clearly inspired by it, but the data sources are very different. If I understand correctly, RentHop mostly focuses on getting information directly from and making money from rental brokers, whereas PadMapper just tries to index everything it can (PadMapper takes direct listings from a lot of the top agents/agencies in NYC/Boston as well, but lots from Craigslist and other places)
As a result, there are data quality differences (RH's is probably cleaner in some ways if it is mostly direct), but also as a result RH necessarily has less selection and a larger percentage of RH's listings probably come with broker fees. Ultimately, which setup you prefer is down to whether you'd prefer to work with a broker, I think.
For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data partners and our own observations about a firm's listings. As time passes the scores should differentiate based on individual activities, similar to our NYC rankings.
I developed http://www.cribq.com because at the time, both PadMapper (if it existed, can't remember - according to domain records padmapper.com was registered after CribQ launched) and HousingMaps were too simplistic and behind on listings to use. HousingMaps had no organizational tools - so I suppose PadMapper "ripped" that idea off of me? (CribQ website is not actively developed anymore, but the iPhone app is quite popular.)
Seriously, why does this accusation come up every time someone launches a site with housing listings on a map? Even if the site is similar, there is no shame in "ripping off" ideas - you will always do something different and hopefully better or useful in some way. If you manage to copy an idea and survive, you've either done a better job marketing or a better job building a product for some segment. Either way, we all win.
Developing a site that is an improvement, different take, or even a copy of another is not a ripoff. Is AirBNB a ripoff of VRBO? Is Google a ripoff of AltaVista? Is Gmail a ripoff of HotMail? Is TechStars a ripoff of YC? Facebook a ripoff of Friendster? You may not agree with their tactics in some cases, but generally the founders/creators have a vision that differs from the site they "ripped off" and have a reason for creating their own version. And would somebody PLEASE rip off Craigslist and win?
Copy away. Or as Steve Jobs says, "good artists copy, great artists steal."
For an example, see how different the results of our both tackling the same problems were - they barely resemble each other in form or functionality.
But yeah, the basic idea of showing real estate on a map is old, I have a research papers from the 80s that talks about making map-based search systems for real estate. housingmaps is the earliest web-based implementation of the idea that I know of, though, and was my inspiration.
Look at Android - it's a "ripoff" of iPhone, and copied much of the design and function. Except it's entirely different. It has created a new, more open and more dangerous ecosystem for applications. It has made iPhone-like functionality available to different markets and fulfilled different requirements. It has lighted the fire of competition under Apple.
While it may annoy you to have "copies" out there, I can guarantee you there was a reason those copies were developed. Nobody spends their hours reproducing existing functionally without some idea of how they will be better in product or distribution, regardless of their ultimate success. They may have been inspired by your work, but almost certainly they saw a need for something better in some way.