Taking the Plunge

Since I recently did some apartment shopping, I thought I would share some tips I picked up along the way. Before finally finding my dream apartment (see previous post), I visited three other apartment complexes and had different experiences at all of them. Here are some preparation steps you may want to take and some questions you may want to ask when looking for your own place.

1. Do your research
I spent hours online looking at dozens of apartments before deciding on a few to visit. Rental Web sites are great resources that can save you a lot of time. Sites like Rent.com and Apartments.com offer really helpful information like floor plans, photos, maps, amenity lists, pricing, rental policies and more. They also allow you to keep favorites lists and do very specific searching by neighborhood. In my experience, Rent.com often provided more information than the apartment’s own Web site.

2. Ask lots of questions
When you do decide to visit an apartment, be sure to ask questions, don’t just walk around and look at stuff. I found that once I got up to the apartments, my mind would go blank and I couldn’t think of anything to ask, so I started writing my questions down. Here are some that I found the most helpful.

- What kinds of people live here? Families? Young, single people?
- What are the utilities like in the summer and winter? Can they show you an example bill?
- What are the most common maintenance requests?
- How old is the building?
- What fees are associated with the monthly rent (garbage, parking, etc.)?
- Is the apartment pre-wired for high-speed Internet and cable? Do they allow satellite dishes?
- Do they offer preferred employer pricing? (I got 2% knocked off my rent for working at Dish Network.)

3. Pay attention to how you are treated
When you go to look at an apartment, since staff should be working to sell it to you, they should be on their best behavior. So if you are treated poorly, you know there is something really wrong. At one apartment I wanted to look at, they scheduled me to come in on a day when the rental office was closed and then didn’t return any of my calls. No matter how much I liked the apartment, those aren’t the kind of people I wanted to be relying on when my hot water isn’t working or my garbage disposal is clogged. At another complex, the staff members who accompanied me to look at the apartment seemed to know very little about the unit or the complex and couldn’t answer many of my questions. A disinterested and uninvolved staff could spell trouble for you as a tenant.

4. Trust your gut
For me, making the decision and signing the rental application was a huge and very scary step. What if I chose the wrong place? What if I didn’t like it when I moved in? What if one of the first big decisions of my adult life turned out to be completely wrong?! The truth is, the apartment I finally went with was very similar to another I looked at (in fact, I found out later they are managed by the same company). But the one I chose just felt right. Once you have all the facts and have looked at enough apartments to have an idea of what is out there, don’t be afraid to trust your instincts when it comes to finally settling with one. I don’t know if I am going to love or hate this apartment when my year-long lease is up, but I feel confident that I made the best decision I could based on the information I had.

So go forth and be smart about finding your new, fabulous apartment. I’m sure I’ll have many more residences over the years and still have a lot to learn about shopping for a place, but I feel like for a first-timer I did pretty well!