My partner and I have been lucky these past couple years to have family members offering us places to live. But now we're trying to get out of the suburbs and move to the city so we have to find our own place to live. I've found places to live before but that was way before COVID and way before I had pets and I really don't want to get completely fucked by a landlord.
Are there any tips for finding a place to live, especially for people with pets? Any good websites/should we just use craiglist/does craiglist suck? What's the biggest percentage of our combined paychecks that should go to rent? What should we do? Please help lol.
We both make a couple dollars more than our local minimum wage but we're still working class if that helps. We'd love to rent a house but I doubt we could afford it
Check Zillow. It has the largest number of apartments and it's easy to filter by pets. The downside is that these apartments tend to be slightly more expensive. The most bang for your buck is clueless tech-illiterate landlords. For the very best deals you just gotta get lucky, walk around til you see a "for rent" sign or be on a university mailing list or something. Zillow owns a couple other big sites but there are some other unaffiliated ones like Domu.
If you want a dishwasher, consider renting a place without one and just buying a used countertop dishwasher. Same with in-unit laundry. Seems to me that if your apartment comes with one of those, the rent will be at least $50 more which over a year is enough to buy a very nice appliance.