With the economy in the shape that it is, more and more people are choosing renting over purchasing. In fact several condo projects proposed for downtown, turned into to rental projects this past year. So when I came across this site, I thought it would be good to take a closer look at it as a tool to help renters finding housing downtown.

MyApartmentMap is a national apartment search website with over 250,000 active apartment listings. The site has just released a new rental search tool that lets user calculate the exact rents for any location in the US, so I thought I would see what it looks like for Downtown Des Moines.

Studio	1 Bedroom
2 Bedroom	3 Bedroom

So how do they get this data? MyApartmentMap crawls most of the online classified sites to generate up to the minute real time data. It then uses Google Maps to display the rental costs of any location. The rental research tool makes finding affordable housing easier than ever. By plotting apartments on Google Maps and color coding by price, users can instantly see exactly where they can afford to rent.

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