Agencies in the mix

We now have nearly 30 different agencies posting on FlyRig and over 10,000 listings for New York City! Below are some of our recent agency additions:

• A-List Properties
• Anchor Associates Group
• City Prime Realty
• Comfort Realty
• Hecht Group
• InFocus Realty
• Knickerbocker Village New York
• Manhattan Connection

The Hunt

Thank you Joyce Cohen for mentioning us in this weekend’s edition of The Hunt, a weekly column printed in the New York Times. If you haven’t read any of her columns before, you’ve been missing out! She provides great insights into the average New Yorker’s apartment hunt.

Note:  We’d like to clarify one point that people may mistakenly assume from the article: FlyRig has no association with any real estate agencies. Although one of the people who helped start this site currently works at First Residential Brokerage, that agency has nothing to do with FlyRig. We are an independent company whose only interest is making apartment rentals an easier process for agents and renters. We do not share or disseminate private listing information with any agents or agencies.

Rental Exclusives

There are some apartments in New York that can only be rented through authorized agents. These units are called “Exclusives”, and we’ve added a new section to our site to highlight them. If you go to the listings section, just click the “Exclusives” tab.

Finding an available unit

During this time of year, you’ll find that many inquiries into particular listings will yield a “Sorry, that unit isn’t available anymore, but I do have something else similar to show you.” Most of the time, this is a legitimate response; good properties often get snatched up only hours after they’re posted. However, there are cases where this is bait-and-switch. Some brokers will knowingly advertise unavailable listings in the hopes that someone will call so they can show them a similar unit. In New York’s cut-throat real estate business, this is an unfortunate, but common occurrence.

Here at FlyRig, we’ve implemented a number of algorithms and behind-the-scenes tools to help reduce the instances of bait-and-switch. If you visit our site regularly, you may notice some large fluctuations in available listings. A big increase usually means we’ve brought aboard a new agency, and a sharp decrease means we’ve removed a chunk of unavailable units.

Unfortunately, our algorithms aren’t 100% foolproof. Here are a number of things you can do that will help your apartment hunt:

• Note the “Last Updated” date - If a listing hasn’t been updated for a few days, there’s probably a good reason for it.
• Flag unavailable listings - Help everyone out by flagging rented units. Doing this also provides invaluable feedback for our system.
• Rate brokers and write reviews – Recommending good brokers is a great way to reward those who are playing by the rules.

Customized RSS

Until today, the only RSS feeds we offered were from specific brokers and of our 20 latest listings. As a renter, it’s likely that you’re not interested in all of our latest listings, which is why we’ve created a customizable RSS feed. You can now specify neighborhoods, a price range, and bed and bathroom requirements.

There are two ways in which to get these RSS feeds:

1. Subscribe to your own personal RSS feed. If you’ve registered for a free renter account, you should already know that we automatically remember your last search. You can subscribe to an RSS feed that’s based on your current search parameters by clicking “Your customized RSS feed”, which can be found in the “Home” tab under “My FlyRig”. The great thing about this is that the RSS URL doesn’t change, but if you decide to search for something different on the site, the new search parameters will automatically be reflected in your RSS feed.

2. Generate an RSS feed from a recent search. Every time you search, a little RSS icon is displayed next to the search totals. Clicking on this will give you an RSS feed that’s based on this search.

We hope this makes your rental search easier! If you have any questions or suggestions on how to make this better, let us know!

A note for RSS experts: By default, the feed results are ordered by “Last Updated” (which basically says they’re still available). You have the option of ordering by “Last Created” instead, which helps if you’re only interested in units you’ve never seen before. To do this, just add “&show=new” to the end of the RSS feed URL.