Adventures in Apartment Hunting
February 8, 2008
Looking for an off-campus apartment is frightening. You have to think about things like shower water pressure, how expensive heating is, and whether or not you can live without a dishwasher. Still, thanks to the fact that Tufts’ housing system seems to be in a permanent state of awfulness, almost every Tufts student will at some point have to find an apartment. For some of my upperclassmen friends, it was a relatively easy process: they looked at a few places and quickly found one that they liked. For others, it involved a frantic last-minute scramble months after most apartments were taken. In preparation for living off-campus over the summer and next year, two of my friends and I began our search about two weeks ago. Hopefully, sharing our experience will help other students navigate the Medford/Somerville apartment scene with knowledge and ease.
Our search began in the most convenient place: Tufts’ off-campus housing website. Landlords can post listings of apartments for rent in Medford and Somerville. After making a list of about 20 apartments we liked, I organized the list based on pluses and minuses for each. Pluses included things like free washer and dryer, as opposed to coin-operated or, even worse, “close to laundromat.” Minuses were mostly based on location: we almost immediately decided against any apartments that could be classified as uphill, since we’re all ardent downhillers, and we lazily but wisely cut out any that were described as having more than a five minute walk to campus. These were our apartment preferences, but making similar lists based on your own preferences can help narrow your search.
Most of the listings were basically the same. None included utilities, many claimed to be the “best apartment you’ll see all year!!!!,” and most had hardwood floors. The few exceptions to this general description were amusing rather than enticing: “Pets is ok,” or “This place is a SPACE MACHINE,” or even “2 minutes walk from Davis and 5 from Tufts” for an apartment that seemed to be located almost in Porter Square. Generally, as long as the apartment has the right number of bedrooms, you can’t decide much from the listing description. We learned this with our first apartment tour.
The address was a little too far for us, but it was significantly less expensive than everything else on our list, so we decided to try it out. From the outside the house was unkempt, bland, and had an overgrown and weedy front yard. The inside felt crowded even without furniture, and the unwashed yellowed windows didn’t help matters much. The bathroom had a cinder block in it. Our tour lasted about six painful minutes.
Our second apartment visit was completely the opposite. The address was on a side street very close to the end of Professors Row, and the house was brightly painted and welcoming. The bedrooms were huge, the dining room had broad windows, and the house felt comfortable. We left thinking that we had found our apartment. I think that we were a little shocked at finding a place we wanted so quickly that we didn’t realize that simply because we liked it, and told the landlord that we liked it, it did not suddenly become our apartment. When I called the landlord two days later telling him that we would like to look at the lease, he informed me that someone else was already signing it.
If lesson one of apartment hunting is to reserve judgment until you see the inside of the house, lesson two is do not wait. Anything can happen, even if it’s only been two days: every other house for rent could explode in some freak accident, or maybe suddenly every landlord will decide that they will only rent to people from Wyoming. Your house will be taken if you are not decisive enough in these matters. It will happen, I guarantee it.
We looked at a few more apartments, and didn’t find anything we liked enough to feel anything more than apathetic about. This is not a good state to be in if you’re getting ready to pay almost $700 a month for the next year. We had also been having problems finding enough subtenants to fit into our somewhat complicated summer and studying abroad schedule for next year, since we kept switching between two- and three-bedroom apartments.
There is a happy ending, however. The absolute last apartment on my list, with the last landlord to respond to my email, and the last apartment we scheduled a tour for, turned out to be even better than the first one we liked. We haven’t yet signed the lease, so I won’t give too many details or someone else will definitely steal it. Let’s leave it at this: it’s not perfect, but it’s close enough for us. It has what we deem most important, like deep closets, great bedrooms – one has a balcony, and one has enormous bay windows – and a nice-looking exterior, but does not have a dining room and is a little further from campus than we’d like. Still, it felt like it could be home, and in the end, that’s most important.