HotPads Helps You Decide When and Where to Buy

In all of the fuss and commotion over the condition of the housing market; one thing is clear: more potential homeowners are looking to scoop up bargains, and more former homeowners who were forced to sell their home and cut their losses are looking to rent. If you're in the market for a new place to live, either to buy or to rent, HotPads can help.

The service aims to simplify your housing search by providing an interactive map that you can browse and search on to find the right type of housing. If you're only looking for rentals, or have a budget to stick to, or are looking for specific amenities, you can filter the search results on the map to meet your preferences.

HotPads is designed to make the search for housing a bit easier than browsing classifieds and dozens of different sites looking for rental listings and for sale postings. Rather than keyword searching or browsing categories, the service opted for a map-based approach that allows you to search for housing specifically in the areas you're interested in living. Type in the city, location, or zip code you're interested in and the map will center itself on the neighborhood you searched for. From there, the map is populated with homes for sale and rental properties that you can hover over to see some basic information about, or click on for more details.

If you're curious about the rental ratio in your area and whether it makes more sense to buy or rent, HotPads can help you with that as well. The service recently unveiled Rent Ratio Heat Maps, an integrated service that displays prices on a map for various locations and colors them based on whether the ratio of median home price to annual rent is high, average, or low. This way, with one glance, you can tell whether the area you're interested in is better suited to people looking to rent or to buy their home. If the ratio is high and the area on the map is red, you're likely better off renting. If the area on the map is blue and the ratio is low, you should consider buying instead.

If you're in the market to purchase a foreclosed home, or are concerned about the way the recent state of forclosures has affected your neighborhood, HotPads also sports a Foreclosure Heat Map that allows you to see which areas in your region or across the nation have the highest and lowest rates of home foreclosures.

If you're just curious what's for sale or rent, you can browse the map by dragging it around or zooming in and out of specific neighborhoods. The listings aren't definite; management companies and home sellers have to submit their listings to the service in order to be included. At the same time, the service sports thousands of listings across the country, so it's a safe bet that you'll find something in your area.

Once you've searched for a specific area, the map changes and you can then control what information is overlaid on the map. The data overlay shows the average mortgage term for your region, and the average interest rate that homeowners in your area are paying on their home loans. With a few clicks, you can remove rentals from the results, show only rentals, zoom in and out on the map, or change the map format to aerial photography or street view. Additionally, you can tell the service what your price range per month is and Hotpads will sort out all of the housing results that don't fit within your budget. The service can even overlay information like public schools, private schools, and public transportation options on the map so you can choose housing options close to those amenities.

As you find potential homes, you can click on them for more housing information and a photo of the home. If you double-click on the house, the map will shrink to the left and more detailed information about the house will be displayed on the right, including photographs, pricing, the address of the home, and a complete description of the property and its amenities. There's even a form you can use to contact the seller or leasing agent.

HotPads was designed as a method to simplify the search for a new home by providing a logical way for people to browse home listings: based on the place they want to live. By layering the search functionality on top of a map, HotPads makes it easy to browse homes geographically and by location.