Naked Apartments allows you to search by subway line

Naked Apartments has announced a new feature that could make a huge difference for apartment hunters in New York City: you can now search for apartments based on their proximity to a subway line.

It’s the kind of thing that’s so obvious and yet somehow you never see it, especially on services like Craigslist.

So, for example, if you work at an office near an Ⓐ stop in Manhattan and you want to live in Brooklyn and commute without a transfer, you can search for only apartments that are near to Ⓐ stops. Of course listings usually say which lines are near them, but you typically can’t filter your results by that information, which makes a big difference.

The company’s CTO, Jay Signorello, told us that this had been a frequently requested feature, and one of their newest engineers executed it in roughly a week.

“Our development cycles are usually very quick,” Signorello said via email. “We are building a culture where engineers have a lot more autonomy over product and get the chance to push changes out to users very quickly.” A critical tool for building the feature was Elasticsearch, which powers all searches on the site.

“Close” is defined as under a half-mile to the stop. So approximately 8-10 blocks.

We covered Naked Apartments’ $103K equity round last September. It’s a team of nine, seven of which are engineers, based in Park Slope. The company has been building a dev team heavy on mobile so it can move strongly into that market, leading with an iOS app due out this fall.