MercuryNews.com | 07/28/2004 | Fake blogger Plain Layne lives on: "Apartment hunting made easier: Lots of people know Craigslist (www.craigslist.org) as a great place to hunt for apartments, among other things.
But as good as it is, Adam Gross thought it could be a tad better. Toward that end, Gross created a Web site called Fastbusy.com that repackages Craigslist apartment listings in a way that makes the information more useful.
Looking for an apartment in West San Jose? A quick peek at Fastbusy tell us that, as of Tuesday, there were 14 two-bedrooms listed for an average price of $1,314.
Gross groups the listings by size (one bedroom, two bedroom, etc.) and neighborhood or city and displays the average rent price for each category. Colored icons indicate whether an apartment has hardwood floors, parking or a deck.
``It's based on the premise that the apartment rental market is based on imperfect information,'' said Gross, who does product marketing for the computer industry. ``The better the information, the better the market. It's ultimately about helping people get a good deal.''
Gross started the site as a hobby and says he has no plans to make money off it. He said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark knows of the site and doesn't object.
Fastbusy has listings for dozens of Bay Area neighborhoods and cities, from San Anselmo and San Francisco to Berkeley and Santa Cruz.
One of the more intriguing features of the site is a series of graphs that chart trends in apartment prices and inventory for the past many months.
In Berkeley, for example, we can see how rental prices dropped steadily for much of 2003, from about $1,625 to about $1,275, and then began ris"