Narrowing down the search for a place to live in New Jersey’s largest city just got a little easier thanks to Newark’s new search engine.

“It’s been rough. It’s been really rough,” says Dave Jean, of Elizabeth.

Jean’s lease in Elizabeth was up at the beginning of June. He says he would sign a lease on a place right now if he could.

Officials in Newark hope that the city’s new housing search engine will help people like Jean as a renter or home buyer.

“In the past, we’ve had multiple ways – You could come to City Hall, you could do a quick search on the internet or you could go apartment building to apartment building. But what we found is if we didn’t have a single place for search to happen,” says Allison Ladd, Newark’s deputy mayor and the director of the city’s Housing and Development department.

Ladd says that even she drove around Newark looking for a place to live when she moved to the city from Washington, D.C.

The search engine is either for potential buyers, renters or short-term renters. Searches can be filtered by price, region, locality to public transportation or more.

"We have about 22% of homeowners and so that means on a regular basis, 78% of our population is looking for housing affordable to them in a rental space,” says Ladd. “So imagine trying to find that by having to go to the City Hall or having to do with independent research. This way you just go to one stop, one site and all that information will be there.”

The search engine also makes it easier for landlords who want to give housing opportunities to those with special needs, like veterans or the differently-abled.

The program is part of Mayor Ras Baraka’s commitment to having 6,600 affordable housing units in the city within five years.