Apartment rentals have become less seasonal than in years past, when the majority of leases turned over on May 1st or October 1st, but many more apartments still become available in May than in the typical month.
On the first of this month, many Chicago landlords sent notices to tenants asking about their intentions to renew leases expiring April 30.
The answers are beginning to trickle in, and you’ll soon see a growing number of apartments advertised for May availability.
The most desirable of those apartments will be snapped up almost immediately – and you won’t find them through the bedbugs (apartment rental services).
As May 1st approaches, the remaining rental inventory will become progressively less attractive. If you’ve ever hunted for an apartment in Chicago, you know that “less attractive” means “mostly downright awful.”
If you’re planning a move for May 1st, begin your search now. And don’t let the bedbugs bite.
How do you suggest looking for apartments? Craigslist seems to be filled with apartment hunting services.
MTL,
Craigslist is a swamp of bait-and-switch ads from rental services.
If you’re looking in one of the areas covered by our Guides, start there.
If you’re looking to rent a home or condo, use one of the major brokerage firm sites that allow you to search rentals. Work directly with the listing agent.
If none of that works, look for management companies in the area you’re interested in. If you have a very specific area in mind, walk or bike the streets looking for FOR RENT signs. Quite a few apartments are still rented this way.
In some areas, rentals are advertised in church / temple bulletins, in supermarkets, etc.
Alert everyone you know that you’re looking. A friend may know about the perfect apartment for you. Your Facebook wall may be your best approach.
Forgive the long post. Having just gone through the enormously frustrating process of apartment hunting, I thought I’d share my experience:
-Joe, I’ve moved into new apartments twice now in the winter. Once in January (never again), and just last week. While I wasn’t surprised by the dearth of attractive listings leading up to a Jan. 1 move-in, I was a little more surprised at how there were similarly few good listings leading up to my Mar. 1 lease. Obviously everyone’s tastes are different, and I was pretty picky about a number of factors, but I’d estimate that out of maybe 50 listings for 1 to 2 BRs I saw in my neighborhoods of interest, there were only 3 that I would have happily lived in. Two were snatched up within a week of original posting. This is all just to say that my experience seemed to confirm the seasonality of the rental market in this city.
-MTL, the hunt is still a royal pain as there is no single source of quality apartment listings that is easy to use. Keep in mind that every bullet point below should be preceded with “Given that I was searching in the dead of winter and am probably more picky than most…”. Finally, I consider myself fairly internet savvy, and work at a computer, so this is what I did:
—Twice-daily craigslist search. Get ready to see the same ads over and over and over, sometimes posted 5-6 times in a single day. Once you figure out the language and style of the apartment hunters/big management companies’ headlines, you can weed them out more quickly. Some of the hunting services are hooked up with attractive places, but the vast majority of their listings are for larger multi-unit buildings. I didn’t want to live in one of those. Another trick to use to your advantage: I found there were particular companies whose listings sucked worse than others. Add a “-“ before these companies names or their email suffix, whatever appears in all of their ads (e.g., -“crap realty co” or -craprealtyco.com) to exclude their listings.
—Go to padmapper.com (which aggregates postings from CL and a few other sites), create a free account, create a saved search, and set it up to send you email alerts. The aggregation is a bonus (even though it’s very CL-dominated), but the huge bonus is the ability to search on a map. It’s important to note that time may be of the essence, and there is lag time between when a new post appears on CL and when it is added to Padmapper. But, once a day, you’ll get an email summarizing listings you may have missed.
—Do the above steps with domu.com, which also allows you to search on a map. I found that while most apartments that appeared on Domu were on CL, there were a handful that appeared on Domu first and/or never showed up on CL. Also, while there are fewer listings on Domu than on CL, it seemed that the overall quality of listings on Domu was better (very subjectively speaking, of course). Possibly because of the time involved to set up ads on yet another listing service?
—Get a real estate agent to email you listings from the MLS. Several apartments show up only on the MLS and not elsewhere. I actually had two agents set up automatic searches for me, just to see if I got different listings from each (FYI, I didn’t).
Good luck.
Mike,
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience.
When you craft a search on Craigslist, it generates a feed that you can access through any RSS reader, avoiding your having to go to Craigslist to repeat the search.
I’ve experimented with the “-“ feature on Craigslist. It comes up short because a) too many players need to be subtracted out, b) there are new bedbugs (locator services) being spawned all the time, and c) many of the bedbugs advertise on a blind basis, in complete disregard of state law.
If enough landlords were to opt into the approach they could make Craigslist more effective through a variety of techniques.
One would be to include the exact address of their property in the headline. The bedbugs won’t do that because, for starters, a) they’re almost all showing the same listings, b) doing so would make their lies easy to track, and c) they’d be subject to reprisal from owners whose properties they’re not authorized to advertise. Tenants would quickly learn to pay more serious attention to ads with an exact address in the headline.
Another approach would be for owners / management companies / brokers with exclusive listings to begin including unique phrases in their ads for tenants to search on. The phrase would be one which would amount to license-losing behavior if used by a bedbug / locator service, e.g. Advertiser-owned; Advertised by exclusive broker; Advertiser-managed property. Ads could contain a brief suggestion that tenants search on that phrase to make finding apartments on Craigslist easier.
You guys are forgetting the non-internet version of apartment hunting; walk the neighborhood you want and look for signs on doors. A lot of small landlords will NOT put ads online and rely purely on door signs. Case in point, friends of mine found their apartment this way after looking at a few units they found online and were just taking a quick look around the neighborhood and saw a sign on a front door nearby and had an apartment by the end of the day (not a fantastic place, but reasonably priced and quite large).
Two internet sources I have used are:
http://hotpads.com/
http://www.remaxni.com (you have to sign up for an account)
Our present pad in Evanston we found on Remax.
I would suggest setting up an daily email alert that informs you when the units hit the market.
I agree with Joe. Use the real estate sites. In 5 years of renting in Chicagoland area, I have never found a decent place on craigslist.
Sheridan B’s suggestion of walking the neighborhoods is also sound. Takes a bit more time, but you might find a diamond.
Final suggestion, is do not forget to look at sublets. Sometimes there will be renters that need to sublet their apartment prior to the lease running out. You might be able to get a good deal if they are in a bind.
Happy Hunting.
Excellent tip on sublets, Dan.
In addition to getting a great deal for the balance of the lease, you might also get a great apartment for the longer term.
I have been trying to conduct my search for an apartment from afar because I am hoping to come into town in the next couple of weeks and I see the same agents listing the same things, over and over. For example, look at this one agent: about 750 spammed ads from March 7th alone.
The agent you called attention to is one of those useless bedbugs who can’t show you much of anything you won’t find linked from one of our rental Guides.
Check our home page and use the Guides you see in the right column.
I will, thanks.
But I’m not familiar with your regulations. SHouldn’t people like this be fined?
movingtheresoon,
The apartment locator /b edbugs are totally lawless. The State of Illinois does not enforce its regulations.
We’ve heard all the horror stories of finding apartments over the years. The Craigslist ads are tough because you have to sift through quite a bit of garbage but there are some real gems that will show up. Another manual way but can still be very effective is picking a weekend afternoon, grabbing your bike or walking shoes and picking the neighborhood you looking for and just write down numbers and make phone calls for all the for rent signs. Some of the best apartments can be found that way. Otherwise, apartment finders can help narrow it down for you. But you’re right, get started NOW for apartments in May.