DC startups: Real estate search engine HotPads sees 260% growth since last year

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I caught up with Paul Gleger of Washington DC based startup HotPads last week, HotPads is a map-based real estate search engine listing apartments and houses for rent, homes for sale, and foreclosures.

If you have not played with their interactive map yet, I suggest you do now as it totally changes the way you search for property, Besides price and location of property you can also search the heat map for population density and per capita income, with results provided in color coded keys. Some other great features are the schools search and the lasso tool enabling you to search a specific area in depth.

About to launch:

Paul couldn’t tell me too much about the new feature, but they are about to launch a heatmap search which is going to color code the area based on how expensive different properties are.

I talked to Paul about HotPad’s revenue model, what puts them in front of their competitors and the Washington DC startup scene.