By far the worst part of living in NYC is finding a place to rent. I’ve been through the leasing process twice, lived on airbnb and temporary places for about a year, and got so fed up with finding an apartment last year that I moved onto a boat. Here is my scientifically deduced 24 step program of recovering from the emotional drain that is the rental process.
- Search google for how to find an apartment.
- Use a few apartment search sites you find on google.
- Find a few apartments you want on each site.
- Contact the broker on the listings to set up a time to visit.
- Show up at the spot you are supposed to meet the broker at and wait 30 minutes.
- The broker finally arrives only to bait-and-switch you. They inform you that the apartment you wanted is no longer available, but they can show you a few other ones in the neighborhood.
- Fall for the sunk cost fallacy and reluctantly view the 3 apartments, figuring you already wasted 30 minutes of your time waiting for the broker to show up.
- The broker tells you that due to 'the season', these apartments go fast and puts incredible pressure for you to come back to their office to fill out the application.
- Despite your better judgement, you are already feeling ill about this entire process and hope it will all just end if you do as they say.
- After the broker successfully lures you back to their office, they try and get you to sign an agreement with them that gives them exclusive rights to your apartment search, and an insane fee of 15% of your first year’s rent.
- If you’re smart you wouldn’t be here in the first place, but if you’re at least a little bit savvy you try to negotiate this down, which leads to incredible awkwardness.
- You start walking away, which makes the broker agree to your terms.
- The broker then informs you that you will need to fill out a few very long forms and agree to undergo a credit and background check, and produce bank statements, a letter of employment, two pay stubs, tax returns for the last 2 years, $150 in cash for the application fee, and 3 months of rent in order to even apply for the apartment. If you don’t make at least 40x the monthly rent as an annual salary, you’ll need to get most of these documents from guarantors that make 80x the monthly rent.
- Under immense pressure to not be homeless, you overcome your weariness of exposing your most private information to a sleazy broker and apartment company, and spend the next few days scrambling to corral all of these documents, and watch your bank account shrink.
- You email the documents to the broker’s personal gmail (which sends off alarm bells, since now your social security number, tax returns, and bank numbers are in the hands of a grimey salesman), and hope it’s all done.
- The broker informs you that you actually have to come back to their office, which is way out of your way, in order to physically sign the documents.
- You get to the brokers office, and wait for a half an hour until the broker finally graces you with their presence.
- The broker then starts printing out all of your documents, collates them, watches you sign your life away, and faxes it over to the apartment building.
- You go home, relieved that you’re finally done searching for an apartment.
- A few days go by, and no word back from the broker, so you send them an email. The broker doesn’t respond, so you follow up with a call. They are ‘out to lunch’ so you call back a few times until you get them on the phone.
- The broker tells you the ‘bad news’ that you did not get the apartment. You ask why, and the broker says they just don’t know - someone probably was faster, or maybe you just don’t have a long enough rent history.
- Despondent, but now even more desperate to find a place to live you repeat this entire process over, and hope that this time is different.
- Unfortunately ‘this time is different’ is an illusion and you get rejected again for no reason.
- Furious you demand your deposit back from the broker and go move onto a boat.
I generally like to keep things constructive, and obviously this has been a rant. Luckily I have the privilege of working at a startup that is trying to fix problems like this. More to come...