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house hunting ain't fun

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Apartment hunting here is NOT easy. This is what I've found from looking for apartments two years in a row:
  • expect to pay more than you are prepared for
  • don't expect much out of realtors
  • start early and hold out for the right place
  • don't bother making an appointment to see an apartment without doing a drive-by first
  • negotiate!
There are four decent resources for finding apartments:
There's this conventional wisdom that the people who own the better houses don't always advertise them in classifieds in order to "keep it in the neighborhood." In other words, allowing them to hand pick their tenants a little more. I don't know how true that is, but I did find in driving around that there were a few places with For Rent signs that I did not see advertised. It's a little odd to me how many property owners are using real estate companies to handle their properties, which I think I commented on last year. Something new I picked up this year, though, was that it's best to go through the specific agent for a property. The idea of using one realtor like a buyer's agent just doesn't really work. As it turns out, the best resource of all is craigslist.

There's something rudimentary about the way that craigslist works, but perhaps that IS what makes craigslist work. I didn't see much overlap at all between properties on craigslist and those being handled by realtors, although i think there may have been a bit of overlap with the nola.com classifieds. New houses / apartments are being added on craigslist constantly throughout the day, with many of them being re-listed every day or so. It's a little aggravating, on one hand, to keep seeing the same properties over and over. But the positive side to it is that it's a easy to keep track of which properties are still available, which ones aren't moving, and which ones are dropping their prices.

One thing to keep in mind, especially with places that aren't being listed by realtors, is that owners can be flexible, especially if their apartment has been empty for a little while. It's more of a hassle to haggle on the price with a realtor, who has to get back to the owner and relay messages, but it is possible. It's also helpful if you have something to offer -- like being willing to do the lawn work, offering to sign a longer lease, or if you're moving uptown, play up the fact that you're a family and not a couple of 19 year-olds getting your first apartment. Landlords love families! Who doesn't, right? You're not a couple of college kids, are you?


We searched for weeks to find the right place. I think Kim probably went to see at least ten different apartments. I did a LOT of driving around, gathering phone numbers from For Rent signs, doing drive-bys on places that we had seen online, and checking out a few of the places with Kim. There were a few notable apartments that we found. There was one on Egret St. near the lakefront that we probably should have taken and we knew it, but we kept holding out for something... The apartment wasn't spectacular, but it was big and functional. The yard, though... the yard wasn't really a yard. It was the park. The "bird streets" in Lake Vista all have these park / walking paths between them so all of the houses are basically situated in this park environment. The house we saw was actually on a cul-de-sac, so the yard was about as open as possible. It would have been a great place to just let the kids run and bike, but there was no fence, so the baby would have been uncontained. Nobody likes an unrestrained baby. You just can't trust them. Oh and Lakeview, especially past Robert E Lee, just kinda feels a bit isolated from the rest of civilisation. It's nice... but it's kinda surrounded by under-populated areas on all sides. Kim and I kinda realized that she'd feel a bit isolated out there during the day, which isn't so perfect.

We saw a few places in the Garden District that were compelling. One on Pleasant St. right off of Prytania that we really liked a LOT, but it needed quite a bit of work to really be livable and I only had so much faith that it would get done. Yet we still kept coming back to that place in our minds and would probably have taken it if nothing else came along in time -- which was quickly approaching. The other one that we seriously considered for a day was on 4th St 1/2 block off of Magazine. It was amazing. It was 150 years old, green with shutters across the front, there was exposed brick and a remodeled kitchen, and a master bedroom upstairs that was literally 1000 sq/ft. Really. But it had a spiral staircase. It might have been perfect to actually give the kids the upstairs bedroom with all of that space to play. But it had a spiral staircase. And the bedrooms downstairs would not have suited Kim, Sid and I very well. But we really wanted it! But it had a spiral staircase and someone would have killed themselves on it.

At some point I started looking at slightly more expensive listings, sending emails asking if the owner would be willing to negotiate with the "right tenants." Pushing it a little, but at least I didn't go so far as to call us the "perfect tenants." I found a place on Arabella, a double shotgun that's been converted to a single house (perfect!!) and sent them and email... and got no response. Then Kim sent an email asking to see the place and got no response... until the next day. So we went to see it at 3:30 on Friday and LOVED it, but we told that someone else wanted the place and wanted to bring a deposit by later. Oh, and it turned out that the owner of the house was one of Sid's pediatricians! We told her that if the other girl didn't come through with the deposit that we'd really appreciate a phone call. I woke up Sat. morning thinking about the apartment and how I would phrase a phone call to her to ask if the other girl had come through and, if not, would she be willing to come down on the price even just a little bit please please pretty please? I asked God to look out for us and help us get this place and if He saw fit He could even have her call right now. And then she called. I swear I'm not exaggerating, it was like two minutes later. For whatever reason the other girl couldn't get it together and they really wanted us to have the house, so we left the house and went to sign the lease on our new place:


Perhaps this picture doesn't fully do it justice, but if you know nola you know this is a traditional New Orleans house. It's a 6 block walk to Audubon Park, near PJ's and Whole Foods, and right around the corner from the house that my mom grew up in on Joseph St. I don't know when I've been so excited to pack all of my stuff and move.

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vacationing in the interim

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

A vacation is not a vacation without free internets.

Did I ever tell yall about this site, Bearskinrug? I love sites that look "handmade." This one is by a guy who does daily (or almost?) illustrations and / or comic panels along with his writing. I really like the idea of doing drawings to illustrate your posts as opposed to pictures. I'd do that more if it weren't for the day job. Or so I say.


Sometimes it's hard to see the internet outside on your laptop, but this deck umbrella is helping. I am in the Wisconsin Dells today, following a fairly long day yesterday of house-emptying, moving activity. To be honest, I'm really aggravated with the movers right now. Not the guys, but the company. After they'd loaded all of my stuff onto the truck and driven away -- like literally right after... we were still sitting in the same spot on the floor where we had signed all of the paperwork -- a woman from Behren's called and said our delivery would be delayed until as late as the 9th. This is after we were initially given a date of the 2nd or 3rd, maybe the 5th at worst. So it's going to be 2 weeks until I get my household back and I have to start at the new office before then. I have like 2 pairs of shorts, 3 pants and 10 t-shirts to wear to work. Great. They've offered to compensate me by paying for a hotel room from the 5th till our stuff arrives, but that doesn't feel like compensation to me. I believe I'll have to call and complain.

So the move has officially begun. We had a going away "party" with Kim's family on Sunday, after which she asked "how come I don't feel more emotional about this?" To her I'm fairly sure that question means "My emotional connection to my family feels rather weak -- I don't understand." But I don't think that's it at all. I think it's just a continuation of my Depth of Experience theory, in which we don't really feel things all that deeply. I guess it's only surprising when we expect to feel something more deeply and don't. Personally, I've been chalking the lack of emotional connection to moving to this lack of permanence that I feel about the whole thing. I think it's mostly a matter of it having been such a slow process over the last month or so. I'm gonna contradict that statement in a second, but let me qualify it by saying that packing and preparation has been going on since I accepted the position 2 months ago. But, in retrospect, selling a house, packing it up, finding a new place and moving in a 2 month span is really quite fast. That's just going from the point that I accepted the job, though. It doesn't include the resume sending, the waiting, the interview...

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