Ask HN: What are your hacks for apartment/housing searches?

[sandmansandine]

There seem to be a few startups out there focusing on apartments and rentals but all of the listings generally just look the same. I was wondering if there we any good hacks HN can recommend.

I'm specifically looking around Oakland / San Francisco and need to commute to SOMA, but any general hacks or sites would be awesome.

[chmielewski]

Whenever I'm apartment hunting on Craigslist, I use a thowaway email account for SPAM\scam\phish resiliency. I use BCC' addressing to respond to 50+ ads simultaneously. Each sees themselves as the sole recipient and all replies are managed in one thread.