Click on the image for a larger one.

I just moved out of the apartment I shared with Ravi and Andre. There haven’t been any updates to the site in about 3 weeks because I was busy finding a new place to live. The rental market in Boston is freaking horrible. It’s a college town, so everybody’s scrambling to find an place to live for September 1st. It doesn’t help that the market is dominated by rental agents – 90% of the apartment rental listings are through agents who want a month’s rent as a fee. I was really spoiled by the rental market in DC. Over there you can always find a luxury apartment, close to the metro, direct from the landlord, 2 weeks before you need to move in.

I’ve spoken in the past to Boston rental agents and they say that you need to start looking 4 months before you need to move in. I didn’t heed that advice because I didn’t know what I wanted to do once my lease was up. Also not helping: a 3 week vacation extravaganza in July. Because I’m working at a startup I can’t quite afford to have my own place (it’s so frustrating) so I looked through Craisglist apartment shares for 3 straight weeks. I must have gone to at least 15 different places and written about 100 emails, but each place had at least 10 people competing with me, and I was never the “coolest” one.

Finally I found a basement apt in Back Bay (!), and it’s a very short commute to work, my girlfriend and MIT. The only problem is that I was looking by myself – the apartment has two bedrooms and there were people looking to rent the entire thing. I had to find a roommate fast, which was hard because the landlord wanted MIT or Harvard people. I brought in a lot of people to come see the place, but most had some issue that prevented them from wanting the place. One girl backed out because she was holding out to get an apartment in Harvard that 10 people were looking at. I doubt she got the place. Finally an MIT grad student decided to take it and signed the lease and a check on the day he saw it. I thought everything was fine until he started freaking out 3 days later and backed out. We (the landlord and I) had said no to a lot of people who really wanted the room. After another round of interviews, it looks like I finally have a roommate.

This photo was taken as we were cleaning the place for the last time. It was a great place to live, even though it was freaking far away from everything. By the way, thanks a lot to Raam for helping me move

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 1:24 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.