Right now, Atlanta is one of the most exciting cities in the country. Having been relatively poor during the seventies and eighties, its quality of life has been steadily improving for about two decades now. Since 2000, its median income has been increasing about a thousand dollars a year. For the past six years, its population has grown faster than any other city in the United States. Last year, violent crime was at its lowest levels since 1969. Perhaps the most illustrative statistic, though: More single-family homes have been built here than any other American city for not just the past year or two, but for the past thirteen.



Several fortune 100 companies call Atlanta home, including Coca-Cola which actually owns Emory University campus UPS and AT&T Mobility. The largest employer in the city is Delta, which uses Atlanta as its main connection airport.

Maybe because of the famous nightlife that exudes out of the Peachtree Street and Buckhead areas, Atlanta is one of the younger cities in the country: Its median age is just 31.9 years. Almost a third of the city is between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. The young people, of course are the ones keeping Hotlanta hot.

Atlanta is as diverse as it is young. About 60% of the residents are African-American, a third are white, and the remaining seven percent come from pretty much everywhere.

Atlanta may be one of the easiest major cities to rent an apartment in. The average rental price in 2005 was just $638. A little over half the houses are rentals. In all there are just shy of 400,000 different households. The homes are particularly spacious: On average, there are 6.1 rooms per home.

There are a number of ways to find an apartment or house to buy or rent here. Newspaper listings, while constantly shrinking due to the growth in online listings, are still popular here, even though they can't be efficiently searched. There are several online real estate companies that offer more complete services and extensive listings. All of them allow users to search listings by size and price, but few offer more possibilities than that.

One, website, however, has by far the most in-depth set of search options, for both renting and buying. City Cribs allows users to search for a home by the details of the house that are important to them. If a user, for instance, is looking for a place with a balcony, they can search just among the homes that have one. Or, if they are only interested in 3-bedroomun furnished apartments with laundry and parking, with pets allowed and no move-in fees, they can search for that, too. Furthermore, the results can be sorted in six different ways.