Always-On Apartment-Search Lead Engine

// CASE RECORD

The problem

A solo apartment search is a real-time race against everyone else refreshing the same listings. The good places move in minutes, the sources are fragmented, and one person can’t watch them all while also living their life. The result: missed listings, viewings wasted on scams and duplicates, decisions made under pressure. This one started as my own search — with a dog in tow, which narrows a rental market fast.

What I built

Find a Pad is my own system: one always-on home base pointed at every listing source, paired with cloud qualification. A read-only, human-in-the-loop Chrome extension drives the searcher’s own authorized browser sessions to surface new posts within minutes of appearing; Cloud Functions parse, score, scam-screen, and dedupe each find the instant it lands; only hot, qualified leads buzz the phone, deep-linked so the searcher can act first. It is read-only and human-in-the-loop by design, with a global kill switch — it never takes an outbound action the searcher didn’t approve.

Where it stands

An active build. The measures: time-to-lead notification — minutes from a listing appearing to a qualified buzz on the phone; qualified leads per day after scam and duplicate screening; and filter precision — the share of surfaced leads that are genuine, not noise. The target, stated as a target: a qualified lead on the phone within about 15 minutes. The architecture — watch every source, qualify in the cloud, notify only when it matters — reuses for any time-critical search across fragmented sources.