I realized throughout my whole “apartment searching” process I came up with some pretty novel ways of leveraging the web to help me find the ideal place so I figured I’d share. Please let me know if this article helps your search in any way.
My Situation
I live with my girlfriend in a brownstone near Cleveland Circle in Brighton. She recently got into an MBS Program at Tufts Medical School. We are looking to relocate for these reasons:
- So she can have an easy commute to school.
- We’re tired of our permanently dirty apartment. (It’s old, small, and shitty)
- We’ve outgrown living amongst loud college kids.
- We just need more space.
A Computer Nerds Approach
I didn’t really know exactly where to start looking. It really came down to location, location, location. We had a couple of prerequisites:
- We didn’t want to live in a small, old place again.
- We didn’t have a very large rental budget, one of us is after all going to be a full time student.
- We need a 2 bedroom, no if-ands-or-buts. Both for my home office (I work from home everyday) and so Ashley can have space to do her school work.
- 2 bathrooms would be ideal. Anyone that’s ever shared a bathroom with a girl knows this!
- Safety, I don’t want to have to worry about her walking home from the train at night.
- We need T access.
- Hoping to avoid a 9/1 move-in at all costs.
- Hiring movers (it suuuuuuucked to move into the 3rd floor on 9/1 without movers, never again).
- Parking for my car.
- Ideally we’d get a modern apartment. (the opposite of old and dirty)
Most of all you have to know what you want. Make sure you’re very specific, have an ideal picture of what you want and a less ideal one that you would settle for as a backup.
Where
Ashley needs T access for school. Namely Orange Line access to the New England Medical Center Station stop.
I used a couple of handy tools to figure out where we could live:
Google Earth
This was a great tool to figure out the where. I needed easy access to the T stop, using Google Earth while overlaying
Layers » Places of Interest » Transportation » Subway,Rail,Tram + Bus
let me easily figure out what was reasonable.
MBTA.com was a great resource
My focus was on the T and Ashley’s commute. Then, I could find apartments surrounding T stops. I got together a list of likely candidates:
Red Line
- Porter Square
- Harvard Square
- Central Square
- Kendall Square
- Broadway Station
- Andrew Square
Green Line
- Reservoir
- Beaconsfield
- Brookline Hills
- Brookline Village
- Longwood
Orange Line
- Sullivan Square Station
- Wellington Station
- Malden Center Station
Living near any of these T stops would give her about a 1/2 hr commute or less. Luckily most of the train lines converge and intersect close to the NE Medical Center stop (pic).
Use Craigslist and PWN it
Our lease is up 9/1 so we started hunting in May - this turned out to be a bit too early. Hardly anything on Craigslist of quality was available for that move-in date. I also wanted to avoid moving on 9/1 because it’s the absolute worst day to move in Boston. Often renters have to give at least 60 days notice that they will not renew their lease. I didn’t start to see quality apts for 9/1 till after the July 4th weekend.
I looked at alternates like oodle, and kahoots but CraigsList was the best game in town.
The best strategy is to use all the tools available so you won’t miss any opportunities of finding a great place.
Use Craigslist RSS Feeds + NetNewsWire (or some RSS reader derivative)
- Download NetNewsWire. It’s Free.
- Do a search on craigslist. At the bottom you’ll see an RSS link.
- Load it into NetNewsWire, let your apartments come to you.
- I decided on a couple of very specific metrics
- 2 Bedrooms, Minimum 1300 (no dumps), Maximum 1600, Must Have A Picture, Search
- Sample Link: http://boston.craigslist.org/search/aap/gbs?bedrooms=2&maxAsk=1600&minAsk=1300&query=porter%20square&hasPic=1&format=rss
- For each “query” I chose all of the previous T stops that I wanted to be located near. query=porter%20square, query=wellington, etc.
- Edit each query string and load them up in NetNewsWire, be sure to replace spaces, ” “, with the url encoded form, “%20″.
- The Net Is Cast
- Live in NetNewsWire until you find apartments worth following up on, mark those posts as flagged.
- Call realtors in batch once a day from your flagged posts.
- Schedule ongoing appointments. I used Google Calendar with Text Message Reminders to keep things organized.
Mash it up with cribq, HousingMaps, listpic
Sage Advice
- Only look at places with pictures, if it sounds good but doesn’t have one, request one. Don’t waste your time and the realtors’ otherwise.
- Go with your gut. If your alarms are going off even if it seems like a great deal just back away.
- Make sure you won’t get gouged on heat. Look at how the apartment is heated. Oil is bad, electric or gas is better. H/HW means heat and hot water are included, double bonus. There’s no reason to freeze your butt off during the winter because your heating bill is $400/mo. Avoid this mistake.
- Ask about laundry facilities.
- If a map location on Craigslist isn’t given, ask for the address. If they won’t tell you, ask for the cross street. Searching “Strathmore Rd at Chestnut Hill Ave Brighton, MA” on Google Maps will give you the cross street near my Brighton Apt.
Resources
Results
I ended up only going to see 3 different places. I got lucky, but I also was very specific in what I was looking for and I saw hundreds of places (online) in the process. The few I followed up with had a very good chance of being the place I wanted because it met all of my prerequisites. We ended up finding a great place right on the Orange Line that met our requirements. Since the apartment has no current tenant we set a move-in date of 8/15, avoiding the 9/1 hassle which also made it much easier to find movers. Hopefully once we’re moved in I will be able to post a followup on Moving Day and The New Place.
Popularity: 9% [?]
On August 7th I’ll be speaking at the Betahouse with John Resig about the jQuery Javascript Framework. My friend and colleague Patrick Haney put this talk together for Refresh Boston.
