Tuesday, May 31, 2005

All hail the little guy ...

I don't mean Napoleon or Gary Coleman. I'm talking about private landlords as opposed to enormous corporate housing management companies.

Amanda and I looked at apartments for a month's worth of weekends. Long story short, as of this morning we received final approval that our application was accepted and we now have an apartment. (For the full story, check out Amanda's recap.)

The thing is, we spent most of our weekends looking at huge housing complexes. The kind of places that have leasing offices, golf carts, and a bowl full of fruit candies. These places look like everything from enormous yuppie holding pens to tiny pre-packaged versions of American Dream Lite™.

The problem is that these places seem to be much more expensive than they're actually worth and their management companies are always two-faced bastards.

Eventually, we went with a small apartment building with only 5 units (a pentaplex?). It's not the greatest looking place from the outside, but the inside is 1.) huge, and 2.) charming. Not to mention that our new landlord is an extremely nice lady who was very accomodating, very friendly, and very flexible with things like move-in date, pet policy, and even a small bit of remodeling in the unit itself.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, big places suck. Smaller places and O'Doyles rule. Craigslist was the ultimate source for the little guy places, while big web sites like rentnet.com (dumb name) simply list the crap towers we wasted our time with for so long.

So, to borrow one of my favorite quotes from Kingdom of Loathing: Long story short, we got an apartment. Short story long, anything by Dickens.

1 comment:

rooni said...

It's actually a six-plex. Our apartment alone is half the building, and the other five apartments are carved out of the remaining half. ;) Yay new apartment!!