Apartment Quest (cont)
About this time, I’m talking with my Aunt Pat, commiserating
about our situation. She jokes that the house that my Uncle Jeff used to live
in has been painted and is getting ready to be put on the market, so maybe we
should just give up and buy the house. The house is a tiny one bedroom, and
they live in Michigan City, Indiana, which is a little over an hour from
Chicago, so I laugh along with her and we keep searching.
But at this point, we can’t keep afford to keep flying or
driving back and forth every few days to look for a home. We try a few calls on
Craigslist, but those go nowhere:
“Hello? We’re calling about the apartment on North Shore? Well, we can’t
come by tonight because we’re in North Carolina… <click>.”
So, we start looking for a broker. An apartment broker in
the real world has a massive list of apartments and homes that are available
for lease. They use the MLS (multiple listing service) and all share the same
list, more or less, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference who you pick, except
that you want someone with a good reputation that will help you find a good
place, not hassle you to try and put you in a more expensive apartment than you
can really afford, and make sure that they get the paperwork to the actual
leasing agent as quickly as possible so you actually get the apartment you
want.
Then there’s Chicago. In Chicago, there are dozens of
brokers, each with similar names like Apartment People, Chicago Apartment
Finders, etc, and they each have their own list of two dozen or so apartments
that they represent in your area, and that’s it. So when you ask about an
apartment that’s not on their list, they can’t help you. There are probably
fifty thousand apartments for rent at any given time in this city, but each
broker can only show you the two dozen they represent. The realtor who can
break that code and offer them all will retire a rich man in a matter of weeks.
For the time being, however, we’re stuck with the current
system. So, we chose one of the brokers that a friend recommended and started
working with them. We looked through their meager listings, and sent our son,
who lives in Chicago, to check them out. He dutifully took his smartphone and
walked through a few apartments, describing the surrounding area, how the
laundry area smelled, what the view was like outside the window, all those
little things that you really like to know when you’re choosing your domicile
for the next year.
We picked a place, dutifully paid the exorbitant “credit
check fees” and put down the first month’s rent. A few days later, we got a
call from our cheery broker, letting us know that the place we wanted had
already been leased the day before.
Well, okay. So, we found that an apartment was still open at
our second choice location and moved our money over to cover that place. A few
days later, we received a call from our broker saying that our credit wasn’t
good enough for this property.
They asked me to get a co-signer. Do you remember a
co-signer? Like when you were 16 and trying to get your first car and you had
to go to your dad and beg him to co-sign on your loan because you had no credit
and you REALLY needed this car to get to work and you PROMISE that you won’t
take girls out in it after dark, and he made your life MISERABLE because you
knew he had your future in his hands and you had to take out the trash without
complaining and get ALL of your homework done, etc?
Now I understand how weird credit reports can be. For my
Master’s, I wrote thousands of words on how unfair it is to use a credit score
to determine if someone’s worthy of being hired for a job because of anomalies
in the credit reporting system, etc. But, we and the brokers knew that our
credit was well above any level of concern, and my pay was plenty to cover the
rent. And I was not about to take out the trash for a week without complaining
and ask anyone to co-sign on an apartment.
When I questioned the manager at the brokerage, he sort of
stuttered and said that they "have had some problems getting things to clear
with that landlord.” A friend suggested that the broker had failed to get the
paperwork to the landlord and they were covering their tracks. I’m not a conspiracist,
so I sort of shrugged and moved on. Third time’s the charm, right?
So we get the third place – it’s reasonably nice (as far as
we can tell from my son’s phone camera) and close to the school. This time
things seem to go fine – we get actual lease paperwork to sign and send back
and everything! Seems like a slam-dunk. So, we lease a 24-foot truck and I load
it floor to ceiling with almost everything we own and drive it up to put it in
storage in Rogers Park.
We are now eight days from moving in, and while I’m
unloading the truck, it occurs to me that if we can move in a few days early,
we might be able to move our stuff into a smaller storage unit and save a few
bucks. So I call the landlord’s number listed on our lease.
Hi – we’re moving into apartment 3A on the 1st,
and I wanted to see if we could move in a few days early, since the apartment
is already empty and all.”
“I’d be happy to check on that sir. What’s your name?”
So I gave her my name, and there’s a looong pause.
“You said 3A, right? Do you have a roommate? I do have someone
moving in to that apartment on that date, but it’s not you.”
conclusion...
