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
The best thing you can do is find a way to hsve 1-2 months for apartment hunting, imo. This amounts to just checking listings 2-3 times per day so that you can jump on the best/cheapest options. Landlords will tend to (or can even be required to) rent based the order in which they receive applications. They are piece of shit leeches, of course, but you can, on average, get in in better apartments if you apply right when they list. This means getting a tour + application ASAP.
Craigslist, padmapper, and facebook are the least bad options. Be wary of scams. Don't submit an application without an in-person tour or provide any financial information without a tour and official application form.
You probably have zero control over average renting rate and therefore the ballpark rate of rent for the area you want to live in. You can just shave off 10-20% or get a better apartment or landlord via this strategy. In my experience, the best opportunities are with small-time landlords that do it for "extra" income and are too lazy to post pictures or anything, and when you do your tour, the place is actually well-maintained. For whatever reason, these folks tend to be the ones renting nicer places for lower rates. The best and cheapest apartments I've rented have had zero pictures posted. It might just be that this made it so I had less competition.
If you give yourself 1-2 months, you can view a few places with no pressure and get a sense for what is renting for what prices for which parts of town. If I had rented first or second places I looked, I'd have gotten stuck with smaller places with oldet appliances and shittier landlords.
Also, a good way to save cash is with older buildings with apartment buildings that are well-maintained and a little in need of an update. These will be the ones that the landlord probably wants to renovate soon, but wants to get one last round of leech money before doing so, so they'll rent it the cheapest. On the other hand, they're gonna want you out soon after your lease, so consider getting a 2-year extension if you end up liking the place after a year.
PS death to landlords