Facts!
Former is 仲介, latter is 代理人 I believe.
ok heres the deal with 591. i’ve been browsing it a lot recently and i think i’ve figured it out.
there are good places on there, but they go fast. if theres a good place on there its going to be there for 1 day max. you need to be early.
and search listing: newest to oldest (cong xin dao jiu in chinese) this will save you a lot of time in only considering the new listings.
i saw a place the other day, amazing location, 22 ping and only 16, 000. great place. unfortunately i was customer number 2 so i was shit out of luck.
don’t be scared of old places either. you are going to be paying more for newer and furnished places. an old place can save you money and still look good if you decorate it well. take a look at all the old looking cafes around! nothing wrong with them.
honestly, you want to be the first couple of hours and put a deposit down
A very informative reply but why the focus on English teaching if I may ask?
Buses are good
Because that is what most Western foreigners do here.
That is a poll from Forumosa. Hardly a healthy sampling of the general western foreign population in Taiwan. How many active users are on here? And how many of them bothered to respond to that poll?
Most of westerners are from English speaking countries, and may be about 40% of them are teachers.
Are there statistics? Genuinely curious.
Hello Hannah,
Sorry to bother you! May I ask if you could PM me your agent’s information? What was your process like? Did they find listings for you based on your criteria or did you send them your listings you found?
I’ve been using 591, met an agent (only used my limited Chinese with him, he didn’t speak English) and messaged a few on line. In my experience, it seems that some don’t really respond. It would be nice to just stick with one person, it’s kind of troublesome to have to explain the situation all over again. I know some Chinese but a little difficult to go into detailed items, so coming up with a contract would probably be a not so fun process. Hope you can help! Thank you! 
Why Zhonghe/Yonghe instead of Xindian?
It was so. But, I think these days, there are also significant number of Westerners working in Sales and Engineering/Technology in Taiwan.
Even more if you define Central/South Americans as Westerners, close to none of them will be teaching English.
Do you define people born in the USA as westerners? Because looking at a map these regions look about the same Western.
I thought it’s short for “Western culture” or something and usually refers to people from the U.S., Canada, (Western) Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. It’s a dated term, obviously, but I probably wouldn’t consider a random Bolivian or Malian (for example) to be “Western”, irrespective of longitude.
Who are ‘Latinos’? Are Brazilians ‘Latinos’?
Doing some searching on 591 at the moment. So many places just look like a prison.
18500. Ok its a prison with multiple rooms but its still a prison.
Still better than many 
At least you decorate the apartment based on your own taste. Much worse IMHO are those places that are already full with tons of ugly furniture that doesn’t fit together and is just in the apartment because the landlord doesn’t want to throw it away…