Slide deck style buildup has me wanting to scream. Then I found out it was Europe only. Can't use a co.uk or denote in some way?

Welcome to the perspective of Europeans on a regular basis ;)

Do agree the slide show is annoying and entirely redundant.

There's a list of supported cities here: http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/city/

If you do a binary search on their API you discover they have 138 cities, somewhat more than listed in the drop down: http://api.rentswatch.com/

They're claiming to have the largest database of rent prices in Europe, is this true?

According to their map, for my neighborhood (XIVe in Paris), they've analyzed 339 flats which is not a lot to be true...

I've collected about the same number just using one website API for around one month while I was searching a few years ago:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kakwa/supybot-plugin-selog...

And their statistics are far too simple. For example there are huge differences between very small flats (~15m^2) and flats above ~50m^2, the price per square meter is 50% higher for the small ones.

A global average like presented is nearly meaningless.

The data collection has to start somewhere! Why not in Europe?

Yeah very poor UI choice in that regard. Shouldn't have to click 10 times to get to the meat and potatoes, and discover it doesn't apply to you.

The site punchline "All rents, all over Europe, in real time" seems pretty straightforward to me :)

Please click on the link above and let me if you can find the aforementioned tagline.

It's in the title of this link on HN, as submitted by OP.

It was not originally in the title.

Which appears nowhere. The only hint that it might be European centric is the use of the word "flat".

The fact that the currency dropdown offers a choice between euros and Swiss francs is also quite a strong hint.

You're right, it does not appear clearly on this page. Only on the homepage. However the prices are in € and the per-city dashboard says clearly "We analysed thousands of flats all around Europe". Also the introducing video lives no room for doubt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a7g69kXn_o

Which, once again, none of that is up front. It's not until you get done clicking through the slide show that you can see that.

With the exception of my London address.

you guys brexit too much. don't complain.

Same here. I was startled when I found out my rent was three times more expensive.

I don't understand how using co.uk would denote Europe? Do you mean .eu?

This is a good idea. The project is still in progress so we can't exclude that US will be integrated somehow!

I knew something was up when they started talking about 'flats'

I don't think a .co.UK domain would be appropriate considering it doesn't support any cities in the UK (and it wants the rental cost in euros).

There is .eu domain for things that apply to whole Europe.

.eu does not apply to whole Europe, it applies to European Union only. There is life and internet in the non EU part of Europe.

Yeah, that slide deck thing needs to go. Just let me skip it.

And say it's Europe only up front.

That was weird. It acted as if everything was ridiculously high with its text, even though my rent is 5% higher than average in "Europe" (and I'm in the US). 5% doesn't seem like a whole lot, but it was like "Ouch! See we told you you didn't want to know how high it was!".... yeah, I don't really care.

Yes, it really felt like it was insulting me. Things like "Holy Moly! We told you it'd be painful!" and "We're so sorry… That's much more than average! Maybe one day you'll own the flat? (just kidding)", as well as the introduction spending several slides trying to dissuade me from continuing.

I also live in the US, and entered the equivalent of my rent, floor area, and used Google Maps to pick what looked like an equivalent location in a major city. Apparently people within 2km of my chosen location are paying half? Ok, that's true in my city as well, except 2km is the difference between a building on the water with a doorman, and living somewhere where people shoot up on the stoop to your building.

You care so little that you felt compelled to comment on HackerNews about how little you cared? I find this level of vitriol (spite?) toward someone else's free service fascinating... as if no one else, ever, might find it valuable?

What a narrow way to look at things. First of all, it seems that cableshaft felt talked down to. In that case it doesn't matter that it's a "free service", in-person conversations are also "free" but it's reasonable to raise a complaint if the other party is condescending.

But I interpret their comment as more directed toward HN users than the creator of this site. That they felt cheated, seeing this link on the HN front page only to discover that it's lame and rude. I think it's perfectly fine to express that discontent in the comments, especially since HN doesn't allow downvoting stories.

Hacker News does allow downvoting of stories -- in the form of flagging once you've surpassed the karma threshold.

Leaving comments along the lines of "I tried it and it sucked because it doesn't support the US" is not, in my opinion, in line with the hacker news civility guidelines -- it's not constructive, especially when "all over Europe" is explicitly mentioned in the post's title. As for site portraying rent prices as "high"... it's all relative; those prices may be high for people in Europe, even though they might be paltry compared to SFBA.

It had nothing to do with not supporting the US. Me being from the US is fairly irrelevant, I wasn't expecting accurate data, just curious what the equivalent in Europe would be.

What I didn't like was that it assumed that 5% higher than average was like some crazy high percentage and I'm getting totally fleeced and "Ooh snap! We warned you! You totally shouldn't have clicked this link! (except we baited you into it)"

It's the attitude the website presented, not the actual data. And it's constructive in so much as I don't want people to use this site as a guideline on how to communicate with its audience when they make their own websites.

5% of my rent is roughly $50 a month, btw. Not insignificant, but not enough to warrant its tone either. And I don't live in the Bay Area, thanks for making another assumption about me.

I think your reaction is a bit extreme (perhaps you're making a joke in the style of the website?)

Vitriol? Spite? Please. I think it's a helpful comment for how to improve the website.

Doesn't work in Chrome.

>>XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://api.rentswatch.com/api/cities/all. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://www.rentswatch.com' is therefore not allowed access.

Hm weird, the API allows CORS https://github.com/jplusplus/rentswatch-api/blob/master/serv...

I liked the heat maps of the rent in various cities, it More interesting to me.[1] Wish they had not just europe, but then you have currencies to translate etc..

[1} http://www.rentswatch.com/#!/city/

I found a problem with the data, at least in Copenhagen.

The squares in the centre of the city have about 5-40 data points in each one, except for the very middle square, which has over 3000. That square has the central post office, and therefore postcode 1000. Perhaps where all the "unknown, Copenhagen" data was allocated.

Bit of a burden to get to the actual answer, but brilliant way to get data / display results.

Not very accurate in Paris though, my rent is actually a good deal in my neighbourhood, and it states it's overpriced. But 2km radius in paris could lead to a x3 in price for the same surface ;)

Exactly. In Barcelona the prices seem to correlate a lot with the distance to a metro station. Plus I have a patio in my flat. Should I include that in the size or not?

Yeah, this pretty much lost me at the point that it asked for the size of the flat. a) very few flats in my area list a size in m^2 b) there are other factors that mean far more to me, or to other people looking for flats in my price range in London.

Flats in London really should give the floor area. If it were required, I think it would be a small help against landlords cramming extra beds into tiny rooms, or dividing up properties.

It's a huge waste of everyone's time looking at places that are far smaller than the agent suggested. "2 bedrooms", but one used to be a closet.

Yeah. I have no idea how many m^2 my place is. It's 4 bedrooms, across several floors. eg, not small.

But I had no way of filling out your requested data. :(

> very few flats in my area list a size in m^2

That's really weird. It's one of the very few objective aspects to measure when comparing properties.

Hmmm, both Australia and UK seem to mostly list properties by # of bedrooms/facilities (eg 3 bedroom, 2 bathrooms, outside shed) kind of thing. I don't recall them listing the size in m^2 very often, or at all.

Our rent in San Francisco was higher than the maximum allowed on the form (€3000) :(

To be clear, the amount I actually pay is lower because I have roommates.

When Americans say they have roommates in SF do you mean you have to literally share the same room as someone you aren't in a relationship with?

While that can be the case, it's usually one person per room with shared common areas like kitchen and living room.

SF is so crazily expensive right now that it wouldn't surprise me to see people sharing a single room (with bunkbeds or something) just to save money.

I'm so happy I don't live there.

In my experience it just mean they're sharing the property, not living in the same room.

Ah. We say housemates to mean that, and roommates to mean if you are actually sharing a room (which wouldn't be likely).

Yeah - people don't tend to say "house" when they mean "apartment" here, so a housemate would imply that you are living in a house.

I'm in Europe and it's unusable for me as well...it all depends on a lot of factors, it's easy to get cheap flat if you are OK to live far from the city center of a city with good job opportunities

It seems to disable form input if you enter a CHF rent in the four figures. Not many people are paying less than 1000 CHF here. Also the interface - having to click through the 'wizard' is absolutely awful IMO. Am I sure I want to know!? Actually I'm not. Because I have no faith the answer will be sensible.

I love the dataset, but square meter/dollar is VERY difficult for me to correlate quickly as it takes a few calculations that are difficult to do in my head to compare apartment sizes.

What if you could see prices by particular sets of square meters? If I have a 300sq meter apartment, I'd want to see prices by the same size.

For me it was right on the money so good job I guess.

I do however think that the next big update should include some measure of the "location in the city". I chose my flat because of the prime location and not because of how big it is.

England has something called Local Housing Allowance.

This sets the maximum rate that a local authority will pay as Housing Benefit for various types of property.

I have no idea if there's a central list of all the LHAs across England, or if you'd have to scrape all those sites yourself. But it would be useful information to have.

Here's the rates for Cheltenham: http://www.cheltenham.gov.uk/info/200008/benefits/565/local_...

Pro tip you can spam click and it'll stop when you get to the point where you enter your rent. Holy damn the way this is presented is annoying!

You're not missing anything by skipping the fluff.

Looks nice, but why does the "When did you move in?" at the end only go back to 2012?

I moved in to my apartment back in 2011 and can not complete the form.

That click-through text thing is ineffective. Would be useful to state clearly this is a geographically-limited service.

There are some rentwatch-* repos here: https://github.com/jplusplus/

Apparently they gathered the data by scraping. http://blog.rentswatch.com/writing-scrapers/

The scraper is here: https://github.com/jplusplus/rentswatch-scraper

Hm, they don't seem to include a specific implementation for Craigslist, though they mention it as a datasource on their blog. Maybe email them for a copy of that.

In Omaha, Nebraska, at least, Craigslist isn't the final word on rent prices. You'll find disproportionate representation of certain classes of apartment/house. The cheapest and the most expensive housing won't be found on CL.

Craigslist is barely used in Europe, certainly in Germany.

Not clear whether to include running costs in the rent (heating, garbage disposal...)?

Nice way to collect the data.