[weeksie]

I love the idea, finding an apartment in this town is a harrowing experience. It's even worse for newbies who don't know the market and often get stuck with overpriced apartments like the ones Jakobson Properties rent out. What do you plan on doing with the data you're collecting?

//edit: On your amenities list, you might want to add a field for duplex apartments.

[rentenforcer]

I'm not 100%, and I turn to HN for ideas. I will likely be providing a free search/compare service for apartment lookers, and eventually charge the landlords to manage their page or something. But any ideas you have I'd love to hear. Ultimately I'd like to make some sort of API to the data (ie: destroy the gatekeeper to this information that makes the market so hard for consumers), but that will likely be secondary to the main product.

[weeksie]

I'd suggest taking the trends from TREGNY (but not the actual values, as they are skewed high). Then taking scrapes from craigslist, leaving off the outliers, and then fitting those values to the trend curves and adjusting based on the input you get from your form. There's a bunch of data out there already, might as well use it in conjunction with what ever you're doing right now.