At least OP had the full address of those apartment on that website, so he could plot them on the map.
Here in Austria, most leeches, sorry, realtors, avoid putting the street in the ad to prevent you from trying to contact the property directly and bypassing their fees, so apartment hunting is even more of a headache.
When I searched for my apartment, I was able to reverse engineer the home's address sometimes when the general vicinity was specified, then looking at the pictures, and comparing them with Google street view. This was a manual process however and only worked if enough outside views were available. Despite the time effort, you still spent less time on it per house than making an appointment for a viewing, getting there, and looking at it. If Google allows you to download the street views for an entire city, one might build an ML solution to bring up candidates at least.
Similarly, in the city where I studied for university, I immediately knew where the house was located just from outside pictures of it in the ad, at least for the districts of the city I was familiar with.
I am looking for an apartment in eastern Europe. I was shocked to see listings with the windows covered in Microsoft Paint. I was able to find the location in some instances by finding the same property in other listings (the images were still slightly altered). This is the amateur move, what I see more often is image alteration so that the light coming through the windows makes it impossible to see what is outside. The same apartment is usually posted by 5-10 agencies, pictures and description almost identical, with different location. You get different responses depending who you call. I hope to end my suffering this year and buy something.
Oh it is definitely possible to avoid this. It's kind of an arms race. The overexposed window effect might be reversed with computational photography for example. Maybe one can just lower brightness in an image editor and discover that there is a residual of the outside left. You might use "looking around a corner" like tricks on white walls, etc etc.
I use a similar process to look at interesting job listings sent to me unsolicited by recruiters. You can anonymize the company but it only takes a few unique phrases to locate the posting with Google.
Oh, around here (Spain) usually they don't put the address in the ad so you can't cross check the information with the national registry and find that the apartment is 20% smaller than claimed.
I've searched for houses in multiple places around the world and the unwillingness to provide the full addresses is often due to agent competition. More precise whether the seller has one or more selling agents.
In places like The Netherlands, a seller generally works with one seller's agent only, and there's no incentive to hide full addresses. Funda.nl has a huge amount of detail, from high quality photos, to floor plans.
On the contrary, in Singapore, a seller often has multiple agents. The agents compete with each other and would rather not share any information at all publicly to avoid other agents using their information/photos, or buyer's bypassing them. It leads to propertyguru.com.sg with no addresses, bad photos, all photos watermarked with the agent pictures. As little information as possible, just enough to draw you into an in-person visit.
There are genuine privacy concerns at play here, for example there may be existing tenants/owners who don't want people randomly knocking on the door because someone saw an ad online. Or getting a bunch of junk mail because there is an extra data point about the property.
I guess the variety of concerns will vary from country to country depending on local laws / existing open data though.
Yeah but this is a "the customer isn't the user" situation. The tenant wants and deserves privacy, and it's their privacy that can be compromised by the listing.
The owner doesn't really have a reason to care, I don't think, and may even be incentivized in some situations to reveal information the tenants would rather they not.
What information? “This apartment exists at LOCATION and will be available for rent at DATE?” And you think the tenant is entitled to stop the world from knowing that because the tenant is residing at that location before DATE?
Goodness. I should give the First Amendment a hug.
I'm still not sure renters really have a reasonable expectation of privacy when the place they are living in is listed for rent or sale by someone else.
In most places renters are only granted 24 hours notice to have complete strangers come walk through their living spaces while the space is shown off. They have no real right to refuse to allow that.
If people start knocking on their door asking to come look at the place they are free to refuse, or ignore the doorbell or anything else. Of course they have a freedom against being harassed, so if people persist they can get police involved. That seems like a separate issue to me from having their address posted online in a rental listing.
>I'm still not sure renters really have a reasonable expectation of privacy when the place they are living in is listed for rent or sale by someone else
In some EU countries they do. The landlord need to ask permission to have visitors at your place and the tenant has the right to refuse.
The tenant has the right to refuse to have the home shown when they are moving out and the landlord is trying to find new tenants? How about maintenance workers fixing appliances or something? That seems pretty hard to believe.
Are you sure the tenant isn't just allowed to refuse "a time slot" but also must offer alternatives?
Outside of necessary repairs or maintenance, you can legally refuse unwanted visits from the landlord to the apartment you are paying rent for.
Story time: A couple of years ago, I was looking to buy an apartment and saw one spacious apartment centrally located that was way below market price but had no pictures in the ad. I called the agent and asked when can I visit as soon as possible since there's no pictures. Agent said the old lady currently renting it does not allow visitors inside, that's why there's no pictures. I asked how in the world can you buy an apartment without seeing it? Agent said that's why the owner is selling it below market price. And the charry on top, if you do buy it, you'll be forced by law to keep the current tenant who's paying frozen rent, not adjusted for the past 20 years, until she either decides to levees voluntarily or dies. That's why the owner had to sell below market.
sorry but every part of this is good? you can't go in someone's home if they don't want you to. you can't kick someone out of their home if they don't want to leave.
someone being this hostile about it is rare but it sometimes happening is a necessary consequence of these rights.
anyway though in most places our protections are not this extreme. you can refuse a specific visit but have to provide a time when they can come later.
Here in Austria, most leeches, sorry, realtors, avoid putting the street in the ad to prevent you from trying to contact the property directly and bypassing their fees, so apartment hunting is even more of a headache.
Still, amazing work from OP.