Apartments

As a recent graduate of the apartment searching process, I had occasion to look at a lot of poorly-implemented real estate websites. And, after some contemplation, I'm going to pare it down to two main thoughts for this post.

First, I encountered one website that sorted its results by the apartment's zip code. Now, I didn't think this was particularly useful because there are something like forty zip codes in the greater Chicago area. So even if you know the one zip code you want, I think the arbitrariness of zip codes means you miss out on a lot of semantic information -- especially when considering a place that might be just over the border of a desirable code. Now, if a little map was shown inline with each listing, I'd be okay with this sorting method. But... it wasn't. :)

The second thing that really struck me was the way that realty places can omit important details, like the exact address or availability date, from their listings. I guess this is to make sure the customer goes through the company rather than going straight to the place themselves, which I can understand. From a design standpoint, though, those are two critical pieces of information to an apartment hunter. Leaving them out means that the company is consciously creating a less effective user experience in order to further their business goals, and the same could be said of inefficient sorts, poor filtering options, difficult visualizations or slow response times.

So, my question: Is this ethical? If you were a designer, and your client asked you to design a poor experience for their web app so that the user would be driven to their face-to-face agents, would you do it?