Cheap. Spacious. In a desirable zip code. Pick two.
You can make it into a theorem!
Cheap, Area code, Palatial. Pick two.
Nevermind, someone beat us to it.
I need to find an apartment
261–270 of 319 posts
Re: I need to find an apartment
#262I am so lucky to have found a room in a descent apartment in a nice part of NYC. As a software engineer making high income, I still almost got homeless in the apartment hunting. Insane!
Re: I need to find an apartment
#263May be I am too old fashioned but I have never been able to select apartments like this mathematically . Sure I have used methods like this to shortlist the apartments, but I still need to visit them and feel for the place before commiting to one place.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seattle has this also. It leads to very stringent requirements, with little room for flexibility, you also have to the first qualified person to respond to an ad. It has also led to a lot of rental supply not being advertised, relying on personal connections to find tenants instead.
It's also difficult to nail landlords on, so it goes largely unenforced (at least in Seattle). Most renters aren't going to be able to afford to take a landlord to court over an apartment they didn't get, they're just going to keep hunting because they're usually on a strict timeframe to move.
Most landlords are sophisticated enough to follow the rules, but it does affect corporate landlords (who always advertise and whose employees can lose their jobs if they don't follow the rules) more than private ones.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aggregators like Padmapper helped for awhile Everyone that attempts to address the housing market just winds up realizing how lucrative it is to not fix it Once they get a little data and hire some agents its just a reversion to the mean
How is it lucrative? Would a pad mapper intentionally make some listings bad in order to reduce effective supply?
Similar how truecar pisses off the dealers and had to stop offering useful info that lowered prices
Re: I need to find an apartment
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't work in all US markets unfortunately, as I discovered recently when considering that very option you suggest. In some slower towns a few agents are willing to do this on the side as a source of income, but then in places like SF the home buying market is so hot, that it's comparatively bad ROI for agents to spend any time on most rentals. I'm curious how NYC manages to pull that off.
This was my experience as well in Seattle. I did a corporate relocation and they also provided a paid-for agent to find rentals. She was pretty much useless. Most of the places she sent us didn't match our criteria very well, and quite a few were above where we wanted to spend. As each day went by and we nixxed place after place she clearly de-prioritized us in her work (I'm assuming she was working with multiple oth…
Your agent had no incentive to do a good job she already got paid before you showed up.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same old lie over and over again. Rent control is limiting the profit you can make with renting out. It doesn't stop profit in the first place. And btw: new built appartments have almost free price setting.
I have friends who used to let their Berlin flat. They stopped doing it after the apartment-seizure law passed [1]. Better to lose the income than lose the property (or be caught fighting an illegal law). [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1061333538/berlin-voted-for-t...
Same in San Francisco. My old landlord never rented out my old place when I left (3 unit building). She was getting close to retirement and had gotten advice that the building would fetch 2-3x if fully unoccupied. So she was just waiting since giving up $40,000/yr in rent for a $500,000 higher pay off is an easy trade off.
People forget that you can always “price in” regulatory changes. Then you just see which path maximizes profit. What may seem ridiculous (leaving a unit empty) actually makes a lot of sense based on the rules.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#268Monospaced fonts are not nice for prose.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#269I'm in the middle of an apartment search. I was reflecting the other day on how much searching for an apartment has changed over the last 10 years. Conclusion: it hasn't changed much at all. It's still necessary to search on a myriad of sites. Most of the time, by the time you inquire, a place is gone. Or the ad was misleading and that "$2000 2BR" is actually "$2000 for the cheapest Studio we have, but we also have 2…
walk around the neighborhood you're thinking of renting in, and look around for signs advertising rentals with phone numbers on them. call them with the bdrm count you're looking for, and if they know exactly what building you're talking about and units they have available, sometimes they'll give you the code to walk right in and check the place out. you can use this convo to push the rate down a bit or ask for a ren…
This.
I was going to say the same:
> walk around the neighborhood you're thinking of renting in...call them...
It works far better in Belltown (Seattle) than the free "apartment shopper weekly" printed ones (which have glossy pictures and outrageous prices).
Your entire post is spot-on. Thank You.
Re: I need to find an apartment
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just keep your eyes open is all I mean. Life is strange, you never know what you're going to find.
That's more of a banal aphorism then a piece of concrete actionable advice when trying to find a place to live. Expecting to get a rent below market rate by arbitrarily walking into somebody on the street is just...
"That's more of a banal aphorism then a piece of concrete actionable advice ..."
Are you kidding ?
It's the best piece of advice you'll read all year.
Go and do likewise!