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Lifestyle Search is the search tool that analyzes of hundreds of thousands of data points to rank every apartment community in your city for the things that matter most to you. ApartmentHomeLiving is the only online rental search that specializes in apartment search that goes far beyond how many bedrooms you need, and what you can afford.
Living with kids or pets? Find the communities with the locations and features that work best.
Love the outdoors or working out? Connect with the communities that stand above the rest for what is important to you.
Use Lifestyle Search in the search filters on any apartments listing page.
Our Lifestyle Search tool is the answer to the real-life questions of how to find the best place to live, beyond the simple equation of “how much can I afford?” and “how many bedrooms do I need?”
Online real estate search has always been focused on the concept of “location, bedrooms, and price.” With Lifestyle Search, we take it much further: We help you to find the apartment you need, with the location you want, at the price you can afford, but also (importantly) with the characteristics and liveability that fit you and your family's needs in the best way possible.
ApartmentHomeLiving.com has millions of data points, gathered in real time from apartment communities from coast-to-coast. This data gives us important and useful insights into how each community in our system matches to the needs of our apartment shoppers.
We are the only site on the Internet that leverages this vast amount of data to shortcut you to finding the best apartment fit for your specific needs – “Apartment search beyond price, bedrooms, and location.”
We start with amenity data and map what each apartment community offers to each of our Lifestyle types.
On the ApartmentHomeLiving.com search filters, select one or more Lifestyle types that match your needs.
With a simple selection, we combine the rankings of every property with your other search parameters such as floor plan, price, location, and more.
This takes you beyond “Price, floor plan, and location.” It is personalized search and super easy to use.
If you want to geek-out on the math behind this super-useful feature, let’s learn more about how it works:
Establish a unique way for apartment shoppers to save time and find their personal best-match apartments without having to visit multiple websites or visit numerous apartments in person. We know that everybody is different! Some families have kids, or pets (or both). Some renters need access to transit and walking distance to stores. Some people are college students. Some people need eco-friendly construction. Some people value access to parks and green space more the most. ApartmentHomeLiving.com celebrates these differences and offers you the tools to make the best choice of apartment rental in the least amount of time. We call it “Lifestyle Ratings,” and it helps you to see the “Best Fit” apartments for your needs in the neighborhoods you want, and within your budget. Let’s look at how it works:
SELECT property_name FROM properties WHERE propertyID IN
(SELECT propertyID FROM properties WHERE property.latitude AND property.longitude IN city.boundaryshape + city_percentage_buffer)Every lifestyle category has an extensive mapping of apartment features to points in our editorial rating scale. For instance, in the “Eco-Friendly” community ratings set, an LEED-Certified Platinum community (which meets energy-conservation guidelines in construction and operation) would be awarded 30 points for having that feature. In total, every community in our system has a score rating for each Lifestyle rating. The total of each point category is calculated on a nightly basis.
Once points are assigned, we create a “class rank” of all communities from the highest to the lowest score for each category. This gives us a relative scale of “best/most to least-fitting/lowest” scores for every Lifestyle category. This sets the stage for the next step in which the “decile rank” of properties is assigned a common-sense star rating that gives our consumers an idea of how to understand the values and amenities of any given apartment community for each Lifestyle ranking in which they may have interest.
For each apartment community in the metro area for each city, calculate Lifestyle Score as (x₁ + x₂ + ... + xₙ) where X is the presence or absence of a community feature representing positive or negative value in a particular Lifestyle calculation. Sort the list of all communities n in descending order, assign a 1..n integer value to each community.
ApartmentHomeLiving.com is a national brand, and we represent communities from coast-to-coast. This means we feature communities decked out with all possible amenities in Los Angeles, as well as well-appointed rural communities with relatively few high-tech or luxury amenities. While surfacing the “best-fit” communities for a user’s lifestyle preferences, we set editorial thresholds for a minimum of what ranks for 4 stars and 3.5 stars. These thresholds are set individually for all lifestyle ratings and are used behind the scenes to ensure that what constitutes a “4 star” result stands the test of comparison to other similarly-ranked properties in the metro and across the country. In short, we will not rank the best local small-town community for a rating category as “4 stars” unless it meets the minimum criteria established while looking at all properties in the national data set.
The top 10% of results are assigned 4 stars in our ranking system. The next 10% of results is assigned 3.5 stars. The next 10% is assigned 3 stars. Properties ranking below 3 stars do not have the corresponding lifestyle score shown on their profile pages – It is our purpose to surface the best-fit apartments for a given set of criteria, not to punish properties for not being a good fit for a particular lifestyle. Many excellent communities for one lifestyle do not rank well for another lifestyle, and this is a natural and expected characteristic of this type of analysis.
The purpose of Lifestyle Ratings is to help apartment shoppers find the best local results for their needs. This means that small markets like Bay City, Texas, or Tillamook, Oregon, will likely not be in the same point-range as compared to apartments in Chicago or New York City. That being said, it is still useful and important to provide meaningful rankings so that customers can seek out the best apartments for their needs in the local area. The graph below shows how the best local results can be assigned 3 stars and shown in the results during an apartment search.