Life Updates
There's a lot swirling around in my head. One writer who I read a recently shared this:
What stands out to me is that Henrik and his wife spent 150 hours to write this essay. I usually try to spend as little time as possible writing. Surely an article that someone spent 150 hours on is enticing. The main idea of the article is that great work stems from solitude / isolation. Solitude is beneficial because it enables you to be creative and frees you from pressure to conform to existing ideas. I'm sure there are various ways to succeed, and Paul Erdös comes to mind as someone who heavily collaborated with others.
Today I'll talk about my ongoing apartment hunt!
Apartment Hunt
2 years ago I moved to NYC in search of love. The path I was taking is familiar to some. A man who works in technology in San Francisco who is frustrated with dating moves somewhere like New York City in hopes of more opportunities. Regardless of the city that you are in dating is hard. Things are working out for me though!
A year ago I met my girlfriend at a presentation dating event. The premise is that you have to create a presentation to pitch yourself to other prospective daters. A few months into dating I began to sell the vision of living together. Now Miranda and I are apartment hunting.
New York City has a notorious rental market. A common part of this rental market was broker fees where a renter would have to pay a broker somewhere like 12-15% of the total rental price to the broker which is effectively a 12-15% increase on your rent for that year. Recently the city passed the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) act which makes it illegal for brokers to collect broker fees from tenants if they are representing landlords. Unfortunately, it seems like brokers are finding loop holes such as not doing public listings for places, or requiring prospective tenants to agree to have the broker represent them.
Street easy has reported that the rental market remains stable since the FARE act, but it's unclear if this is the reality. Perhaps it's still to early to determine the impact of the FARE act which went into effect June 11th, 2025. Personally, I've found the apartment hunt challenging.
My initial thoughts were that if Miranda and I pooled our resources we would be able to find something that is nicer for both of us. This is challenging in some ways, because Miranda has a bedroom that is larger than my whole apartment, and because I have a rent stabilized apartment. In some ways we both have good deals respectively. At one point I thought we would be able to swing having a two bedroom, but through our limited hunt I've started to update my expectations. From what I have seen if a place is 2 bedrooms at the price point we are targeting then what they are offering is 2 very tiny bedrooms.
Two tiny bedrooms is maybe appealing from a roommate situation, because you can swing having a lower rent. If you are sharing a room though it's probably more comfortable to have one big room as opposed to two small rooms. Thinking about roommates though I'm sure they wouldn't want to have small rooms either, so it's just a subpar situation all around.
The collective housing budget is approximately $4,000 a month which is more than our combined current rents. I think for this much we can hope to something decent in the area we are targeting. A lot of the time I am looking at the same listing over and over again on Street Easy. Sometimes I venture out only to find out that the place is too isolated from transit or would have bad transit options overall.
My existing landlord has a ton of housing stock in the city, and I figured I would be able to reach out to them and they would help me find a place, but they didn't seem interested. They directed me to their broker, who made no effort to reach out to me. When I asked the broker about one of their listings he told me there was already a pending application. When I asked him to let me know about future listings he didn't say anything.
At open houses that I've attended I learned that an open house isn't really an open house. Often times you have to reach out to the broker and schedule an appointment which is quite annoying. Sometimes when you reach out the brokers will immediately start asking you personal questions such as your income. They are evaluating how realistic of an applicant you actually are.
The conventional wisdom is that good apartments aren't on the market for very long. Therefore, some people suggest touring places as soon as they are listed. If you can get an application in before anyone sees the place perhaps that's all you need to get an edge. In fact for some listings people offer above the asking price, so they can have better odds of securing the lease.
If your apartment is not rent stabilized then there is no legal limit to how much your rent can raise. The only legal requirement is that your landlord give you advanced written notice if they want to raise your rent 5% or more this is a 30, 60, or 90 day notice depending on how long you have lived at your place. In the past when broker fees were more common place perhaps landlords had more leeway to raise the rent, because moving would likely incur both a broker fee, and moving costs in addition to the annoyance of finding a new place and having to move.
Based on these difficult rent conditions it can be advantageous to chase down rent stabilized apartments. Interestingly enough almost half of all apartments in NYC are rent stabilized, but understandably applying to these apartments is more competitive, so much that websites have been created to help you track down rent stabilized apartments. The premise is that since leases renew around the same time each year you can use historical rent data / listing data to anticipate what units may be placed for rent again. For example, units whose lease expire in July are likely to be listed for August or September. Instead of waiting for the units to be listed you can proactively reach out to the brokers about the units to inquire if they are going to be listed.
Perhaps this is over the top, but another thing that can be done is to write letters to the people who live in the building including an email or phone number they can contact to inform you if they are moving out. Although this seems a little invasive perhaps the recipients of the letter are sympathetic to your cause, because they've been renters themselves and they understand the difficulty of finding a place in New York City.
Even though technology solutions such as rentreboot already exist to help you find an edge when apartment hunting I figured I could try to give myself an edge by programming something. Unfortunately, I found that places such as Street Easy don't really provide API access. This is a little puzzling, because other sites are clearly pulling data from Street Easy. Perhaps what those sites are doing are scraping the sites to get the data themselves.
In the midst of writing this I did subscribe to rentreboot on the off chance that it helps, I just have to remember to cancel my subscription. Miranda and I have also restarted our apartment hunt in earnest. Now that we are closer to the end of August and beginning of September there will hopefully be availabilities. I'm also back to trying to reserve my weekends to be available to apartment hunt. Let's see what happens.