Chicago’s apartment rental services / locators / finders (bedbugs) work diligently to make you believe that finding an apartment in Chicago is a daunting task. It’s not. It’s relatively easy, and YoChicago is working diligently to make it even easier.
If you’re looking in downtown Chicago or in Lincoln Park, skip Craigslist. It’s a massive waste of your time, and trashed by 1,000s of bait-and-switch bedbug ads. Go directly to our rental Guides, where you’ll find every apartment building in the area, and management companies with properties in the area, listed and linked. Most of the property and management company Web sites we link include photos, floor plans and rent ranges, and many of them list specific vacancies and rents.
The Guides also feature neighborhood descriptions, photos, maps, video, links to Yelp and Apartment Ratings reviews, WalkScore ratings, and helpful tips and advice. We tell you who lives in a neighborhood, why people move there – and why they don’t.
If you can’t find what you want through one of our Guides, you’ll find many additional rentals by searching homes, condos and townhomes in the Multiple Listing Service at a reputable broker site. We recommend using one of our firm’s clients: Coldwell Banker, Koenig & Strey or Prudential Rubloff. Each of those sites enables you to save search criteria and receive email notification of new listings.
New – Yo’s at-a-glance list
If you just want to laser in on larger rental buildings, we’ve summarized all of your options into a downloadable Google spreadsheet that has links to every building, Yelp and Apartment Ratings reviews, and a grid showing you the types of apartments (Studio, 1-bedroom, etc.) available in each building. You can save amd mark up a copy of the spreadsheet to keep track of your favorites and store notes on your search.
We’ll expand the features of the at-a-glance list over time, and add more Guides. We welcome your suggestions and feedback on these features. In the meantime, check out the at-a-glance list, pass it on to anyone you know who’s looking to rent in Chicago’s downtown or Lincoln Park neighborhoods – and tell them to visit YoChicago for more info about renting in Chicago,
This is definitely a huge help for anyone planning a move to Chicago, thanks!
Have you guys ever thought about reviewing the different property management groups? Like Group Fox, Hunter, etc. I know they have Yelp and other sites for that, but those tend to be dominated by jaded ex-tenants. It would be interesting to see a journalistic approach to them.
This is terrific. The guides are great, and anything that makes this information more accessible and usable is even better. How about overlaying the various properties on a map? Or expanding to more neighborhoods?
A journalistic approach to management companies is a very tough challenge, and would require more resources than we have available to do a credible job.
That said, the large, professional companies that manage high-rises are generally very good, and very responsive to tenants, so there’s little point to reviewing them individually.
The neighborhood management companies are a different story, and they vary wildly in quality, but some of the best occasionally manage bad buildings that have greedy and short-sighted owners.
Management companies are, to a very large extent, at the mercy of their property owners. If an owner won’t budget / approve the money to address problems, there’s little the management company can do. A good management company can appear bad because of a tight-fisted owner, and it’s very difficult to sort out where the responsibility lies. Resigning the account isn’t likely to help tenants, since the owner will find a worse management company to retain.
Reviews on Yelp, etc. are difficult to evaluate, and getting more difficult. I’m seeing a lot more fraudulently positive reviews. There’s also the fact that tenants who’ve had what they perceive as a bad experience are much more likely to write a review than are the happy tenants. And the rental services have been known to trash landlords who don’t cooperate with them by planting negative reviews. I know one very good management company that, for a variety of reasons, has had quite a few very negative reviews on Yelp.
We’ve used Yelp reviews to spotlight some of the worst management companies, and will continue to rely – skeptically – on Yelp reviews. We think it’s safe to assume that a company that plants lying reviews on Yelp will lie about anything.
We’ll probably do some objective reviews in the future, but we’ll limit them to individual buildings. That’s an easier task and one that’s likely to prove more reliably useful to renters.
Aaron,
Maps and expansion to additional neighborhoods are on our to-do list.