How people search for Apartments in USA

I am setting up www.apartments-finder.com a free real estate portal for USA and would like to create a user friendly search facility.

How do people usually search for apartments?. Do they use zipcodes only?. Do they use city name & zipcode or city name only?.

 

You'd want to cover all possibilities, some people dont know zip codes for some areas so use city names.

 

For cities, you will want to have subcategories for neighborhoods. In my own experience, that's what people are looking for. A zip code is only sort-of useful - in less populated areas a zip codes often cover too big an area for people to really narrow down their search, and in big cities zip codes can split neighborhoods.

See for example Boston neighborhoods, New York neighborhoods, San Francisco neighborhoods, Los Angeles neighborhoods, etc. Even much smaller cities (250k-500k) have distinct areas to live in, and that's what I think most people are looking for.

 

Thanks a lot for your replies and for pointing me in the right direction. So, with the definitions given above I am assuming "neighborhood" is not necessarily a "city" and it may be a large distinct area within a city. Is this correct?. I guess the structure looks like

-USA
-States
-County
-City
-Neighbourhood

Is my understanding correct?.

 

People shopping for a place to rent also limit their searches by price. If they are looking for an $800/month place they will typically look in that price range and pick the place that gives the best value for the money.

 

Of course, price! I think the way Craigslist does it is allow you to enter a range, so you can see all apartments from $800-$1000.

 

Yes, thats right. I am including those provisions such as Price, Bedrooms, Bath would be available. As I am providing radius based search (in addition to the above), I am trying to understand geographical hierarchy being used for searching a property.

I just bought USA zipcode data and am trying to figure out the meaning of each column especially the one which says "ZIP Type" with values 'U', 'S', 'P' etc. I am not sure if 'S' represents suburban/neighborhood area

 

I don;t think people search by zipcodes, just my 2c.

 

its better to integrate with maps like google maps so that its easy to search

zip code some people like me would prefer to search

 

This guy has made a zip code/google map mashup
http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm

Including something like that would be really helpful.

 

Nonny, thank you so much. This one is absolutely brilliant.

 

guys, thanks for your directions. I have made few implementations and I would really appreciate, if it fullfils the geographic coverage.