Finding good rental housing in Vancouver is hard. A recent study showed that Vancouver is the second most expensive housing market in the world. Rent is quite expensive and decent apartments or rental houses get snapped up pretty quickly. A dear friend is looking for a new place to move as their landlord has sold the house they’ve been living in. It’s a stressful situation.
Elaine Miller had a bright idea on using IFTTT to keep tabs on a specific search on Craigslist’s Apartments/Housing for Rent boards and drop the results into a Google Drive spreadsheet.
Here’s how you would do this.
- Create an account on IFTTT.com
- Figure out your Craigslist search. This example is for a 2 bedroom that is less than $1600/month.
- Use this IFTTT recipe: searching for what? a Craigslist spreadsheet. A recipe is a simple program that says if a certain condition is met, then do something.
- You will be prompted to activate the Craigslist and Google Drive channels. A channel is IFTTT speak for an input or output.
- Copy/Paste the URL from your Craigslist search. For this example it is http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/search/apa?sale_date=-&maxAsk=800&bedrooms=1
Give your spreadsheet a useful name. For this example I’m calling it “2 bedroom $1600”.
- Click on the big blue “Use Recipe” button at the bottom of the page.
- In Google Drive you’ll see a folder for IFTTT. The spreadsheet 2 bedroom $1600 will be in this folder. New results for your search will show up as a row in the spreadsheet. You can share this spreadsheet with other people, thereby saving your housemate’s time. You also save time (and perhaps the added anxiety) repeating the same search.
Brilliant!!!
So very kewl Tara!