I recently started a new job and moved to New York City. Part of that process was finding a lease in the city which honestly sucked. It was winter so availability was less than ideal, with that plus the holidays I did not have that much time to look and was stressed out.
I was primarily looking on StreetEasy which a super popular Zillow spin off for renting in NYC. The site lacked some features that I thought I needed and wanted to show off a chrome extension that I made that addresses some of them.
Built With
I’ve previously built some chrome extensions and it was a pain, but this time around I used Plasmo which is a super nice platform for helping write chrome extensions. I had used it a little bit before doing some contracting for ThirdChair YC X25 but this was the first time using it for my own project.
I also used the more basic options of React, TypeScript, Chrome Storage API for local storage, and the StreetEasy (undocumented) API itself.
Features
Here’s some of the features with screenshots that the extension does. I was again on a time crunch and it was fairly vibe-ish coded and the UI I didn’t put much time into at all so ignore that!
Availability Dates
StreetEasy normally only lets you filter by like a latest move in date but sometimes the returned listings would be way off what you wanted. This made it super annoying as it’s only displayed when you open a specific page.
I updated it so that on the search page it would show the availability date.
One problem here was rate limiting as each listing kicked off an API request so I was getting blocked a lot more here. I think there’s probably smarter strategies that could be implemented but I was getting more captchas than normal.
Hiding Sponsored Posts
These were often not even in the area you were looking and were not helpful at all. The photos would look amazing and it would be pretty cheap but it would be somewhere really far away and I felt duped every time.
There’s a toggle that lets you hides these posts in the chrome extension tool tip.
Skips
I didn’t end up using this feature too too much but you can skip/hide existing listings.
Favorites
The next group of features is my favorite so I’ll show them in a combined video down below but, favorites lets you mark a particular listing as a favorite to come back to later.
Ratings
This was by far the most helpful feature, it let me rate specific apartment listings out of 10 that I would see and also BUILDINGS! So that even if apartments came and go I had a nice list of buildings to tour in case that particular listings came up I would’ve hopefully already toured the building.
I’ll show it in a demo video below, but it also let you see based on your profile all the top apartment and buildings that you rated out of 10 so you can sort and search easier especially if you’re time crunched and trying to tour everything in 3 days like I was.
Tags
Tags are pretty similar to ratings, but I was just using these to mark certain places mostly as to-tour or expensive.
General Comments
These were just little text boxes to write specific notes about a given listing/entry. I used these a little bit but the ratings was my most used feature.
Here’s the video
Import and Export
You could also export all of your data (saved in localstorage) to a json, or reimport it. I think it would be cool to share this with some light cloud sync in the future to let multiple users that are all looking for an apartment together to coordinate notes.
I think it wouldn’t be too bad to try to link this up to convex so if you want to see me do that let me know!
If you think this might be helpful to you go check out the GitHub Page Here!
Or if you have any ideas on how to improve this maybe I will before I have to hunt for another lease
:(