// the find
VikParuchuri/apartment-finder
A Slack bot that helps you find an apartment.
A Python bot that scrapes Craigslist housing listings, filters by price, neighborhood bounding boxes, and transit proximity, then posts matches to a Slack channel. Written in 2016 as a one-person tool to find an apartment in SF, and it worked — that's the honest scope of it.
The geo-filtering approach is practical: coordinate bounding boxes plus a fallback to neighborhood name matching covers the common case where Craigslist listings omit coordinates. Transit distance scoring is a nice touch that goes beyond basic filters. Docker setup means you can get it running without fighting Python env issues. The codebase is small enough to read in an afternoon and fork without much risk.
Last pushed in 2019 and Craigslist has changed its HTML structure and anti-scraping measures multiple times since — there's a good chance the scraper is broken out of the box. Hardcoded Bay Area defaults in settings.py means anyone not in SF has to touch six or seven config values before it does anything useful. SQLite for deduplication is fine locally but the whole thing falls over if you want to run multiple instances. Slack's legacy test tokens (used in the setup docs) were deprecated years ago; the auth flow needs updating.