Trulia, the online real estate search engine now owned by Zillow, launched an interesting new feature today that allows you to quickly find rental homes and apartments that have good public transport access. Rent Near Transit, as the new feature is called, is essentially an additional search filter that removes all houses that are more than a 15-minute walk away from a major transit station.
For now, those major stations include the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system around San Francisco, the Boston ‘T,’ Chicago’s ‘L,’ New York’s subway lines, Philadelphia’s SEPTA system and the D.C. Metro in Washington. Yardley Ip, GM of Trulia Rentals, tells me that the company is looking to add support for other cities and additional transit systems over time.
Using this new feature, renters can also compare the average rental prices around different stations to help narrow down their search even more.
By focusing only on a few select transit systems, this new feature may be a bit too limited, though. There are, after all, other ways to get around on public transit than just the six systems the company currently supports. Ip acknowledged as much and noted that this new feature is the result of an internal hackathon and that the company still has lots of ideas for how to improve it over time. If you’re specifically looking for a place close to a BART station though, this is definitely worth a try.
This new feature is now available on Trulia’s desktop site and on the mobile web.