RUBs - This is a bullshit system to be added to your rent with. This is basically saying “on top of what you’re paying to use, you’re to pay what EVERYONE else in the building uses!” even if it’s divided up. I get fucked over every winter for example, because I use electric heaters in my apartment and nothing gas-related. I’m still smacked with $48 ~ $62 of usage, despite that. This raises my rent up and makes it variable.
No-Bite Management - Management who lets nearly everything go, despite them trying to sound strict. You may be in a bit of a rivalry with a neighbor who likes slamming things or having loud music, obviously breaking lease agreement, who makes you wonder why they’ve gotten away with it as long as they have. You record, you report but management does next to nothing. They tell you to your face that the only way they can move forward, is a police report. Now that kind of thing should be reserved for more escalated and involved cases, not something management could deal with when they were the ones who made up the terms of the lease agreement.
Pets - From experience, people are AWFUL with their pets. Mostly dogs, I’ve never seen anything go wrong with cats, unless the owners don’t care enough to let them run around until they’re kidnapped or ran over. But dogs, they just let them go and go with the barking. Not to mention the dog shit on the ground they refuse to pick up.
A pretty obvious red flag would be a listing that looks well and good but when you peel the curtain back a bit in a pre-rental inspection, major problems start showing.
Related: a place listed as having new appliances and such but the HVAC system is 20+ years old.
If you use electric heaters and have gas, your a fucking idiot costing everyone money.
Don’t be rude dude. But you’re correct. Not using your payed for part of the gas just shifts your neighbors gas cost in part to you. Using electric heating costs you the power in top.
Shoddy or delayed repairs.
Before you rent, open all the cupboards and drawers, look for tell tale signs of pests. Feces or dead bodies, hairs.
The longer the list of what you’re responsible for the less likely you’ll get your security deposit back.
Not letting you take pictures while inspecting an apartment.
Check all the drains and faucets, flush the toilet. Make sure there’s good water pressure and drains are cleared.
Don’t let them bait and switch you with an apartment.They might show you an apartment that’s in really good shape and act like that’s the one you’re gonna get, and then they give you a different one that is not in good shape, so make sure that the apartment you’re looking at is the exact apartment that you’ll be getting.
Also, don’t skip this one, talk to the neighbors. I know it’s awkward and you’re not going to want to do it, but it’s really the best way to get information. They will tell you how things actually are.
Here are a few suggestions.
Go to the place at around 10 pm on a Saturday night. Most places are quiet during the day; you get an idea of what the area is like after dark.
Bring a phone charger and test every outlet. Check every faucet and see if the water gets hot.
Step into the shower or lay down in the tub.
Be sure you can bring in the furniture you already have. Some places have weird, narrow passages.
Make sure that there’s a grocery in walking distance.
Make sure that there’s a grocery in walking distance.
laughs in american 😅
Where do you live where there’s a lot of action on a Saturday night and no food stores nearby?
a sleepy town in orange county, california. There’s no action, one has to drive to get some activity. But the schools are really good and the environment is very safe.
I live in Philly and schools were so “ghetto” :(
I got builled so much, so much Sinophobia for some reason…
I think the elementary and middle school were like 2/10 and the highschool was like 3/10
ugh
so… damn… miserable…
no idea how I survived that…
Oh wait I didn’t really survived that, I got battle scars
some dipshit decided to fight me and I got arrested
Thank god¹ I have citizenship to shield me from potential deportation issues
¹okay well not god lol, just a figure of speech, thanks mom for having citizenship so I automatically got it as a minor
I have a Chinese restaurant and bakery within like… 10-20 minute walking distance
A sort of mall area and a bunch of stores withing 15-25 minute walking distance
My mother got robbed once while carrying like red-envelopes worth of like $500 after Chinese news years… so yea there was that…
Feels kinda like wild west lol 👀
Chaotic af
I hear a bunch of “fireworks” in the middle of the night…
Yea I’ll just pretend its fireworks, definitely not some dude that drove out of kensington and started doing a drive-by. 'Murica, baby!
Jesus christ, I have to move to a good neighborhood before ever having kids, cuz this shit is torture lol
I hated my mom for moving us to Philly. WTF
Brooklyn was FINE. WHYYY?!? School was 8/10 now dropped to ass 2/10
So much trauma… thanks mom
(Cuz NYC rent was so expensive and it kept rising like there was a $100 rise in rent by the time we were about to leave)
So yea… my parents own tbis house now… so no rents to pay… but at what cost?
Well now I know what the back of the police car and the inside of a detention cell look like
yay
Fucking Sinophobes everywhere jesus christ
Did this series end?
???
I mean I finish K-12 by now if that’s what you mean
But I’m still in Philly 🤷♂️
Sounded like you were rewording The Fresh Prince of Bel Aire song lmao.
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One thing about the electricity check, get an outlet tester with a ground indicator and use that, some places don’t have grounded plugs, your UPS and some power bars might tell you this info as well, would be a tad late at that point though.
Also look for burn marks on the sockets while you’re testing, improperly set up outlets also sometimes spark a bit when things are plugged into them.
An outlet tester is the best $10 you can spend for a little peace of mind
New York City here.
Made me realize that the civil servants/power companies in my area actually do their job.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an apartment where there were burn marks around the outlets, and I’ve been in some sketchy places
Eh I don’t know how often that is the case, depends on the building :P
At one point the roommates and I were living in a house in Williamsburg with the owner living upstairs above us. The owner bought the house a few years prior, apparently the original owner did all the electrical work himself. You could tell everything was wonky, most of the outlets weren’t grounded, many outlets were installed upside down, two bedrooms along with the kitchen and bathroom were on the same circuit so half the apartment would lose electricity whenever someone ran a hair dryer in one room along with the toaster in the kitchen. The building’s circuit breakers were downstairs in someone else’s basement apartment so we got to know our downstairs neighbor pretty well, haha.
I used to wonder how that house passed inspection or if NYC even does those type of inspections. Eventually the owner re-sold the house and we had to move so that was that. But I get the feeling there are tons of old houses in Brooklyn/Queens like that.
a grocery in walking distance.
Sounds like communism to me. >:(
NO
SOUPGROCERIES FOR YOU
I pay attention to the condition/cleanliness of the hallways and stairs in the building. If the owner can’t be bothered to maintain any of that then you already know the apartment itself is going to be a mess as soon as something goes wrong.
A bit harder to judge but if it looks like other tenants/random people make a habit of hanging out in the hallways/stairwells then that’s a massive red flag. One time I went to see an apartment and a guy inside the building on one of the stair landings was chilling out smoking a massive cigar next to the window… I knew right away that building is always going to have cigar smoke.
This one might sound silly but I have a habit of testing the water in the bathroom and kitchen. That tells me what the water pressure is like as well has how well the hot water is working.
Maybe a bit nit picky but I usually bring a tape measure and do some quick room measurements to figure out if furniture is going to fit & whatnot.
Oh and like the other comment said it definitely helps if you know what the area and the building surroundings are like at night.
Gonna have to disagree on your second point. Stairs landings etc. are public places and if you live there you have every right to hang out wherever you please so long as its not impeding foot traffic. The thought that people existing outside their homes and apartments being a red flag is ridiculous and encourages people not to know their neighbors and community.
To each their own.
Some folks like a place where people keep to themselves.
One red flag is when your landlord lives in the same building or on the same property. That is never a good sign.
I once rented a room where the landlord lived in the house next to the appartement. He (and especially his wife) was very nosy; during summer they did lawn work and tried to eavesdrop at any opportunity (although I always was offered fresh home-grown vegetables, so at least I saved money on that). The landlord had the switch for our heating inside his own house. During winter I and the other roommates had to go over to him and demand that the switches the heating on again.
If you see any empty beer bottles on your nearby doorsteps, know you’re not gonna get any sleep on the weekend if you move in.
if at all possible, check to see how old the buildings/property is. My dad noticed that my first apartment was from at least the 1960s or 1970s because of how high the light switches were (it was before regulations that required those to be handicap accessable). Also when I started putting furniture in, I put a shelf against one wall near a hallway and the wall was slanting inward, which I wouldn’t have noticed if not for the shelf
I had a place once so crooked all our ice cubes in the trays were slanted. This was the third (and top) story too. Floor just sort of rolled off to the northwest
The no-bite management is so true. At first “cool they’re chill”, but when our baby’s bedroom was getting smoked with weed coming from the downstairs through the a/c vent every single day and the neighbor downstairs ignored my requests to smoke on the balcony rather than in the room below my baby, all I got from management was “so what? I smoke too”.
As a renter you should never rent to drug addicts if you want your shit to not get stolen.
is a police report
If they’re in contravention of city by-laws, then that’s what’s needed. Ofc they might be saying that just to scare you or whatever, but having an actual police report about the issue really lights a fire under their ass. I did this with one neighbour that would always start blasting music at 2am, like it was his own personal nightclub. It took months, multiple phone calls, and visits from the police but when I finally filed that police report they were evicted a couple months later. Don’t be shy about calling the police to deal with those issues (unless you’re American) as that’s one of the services they provide (unless you’re American).
One tip I can give is see how many people have ac units in their windows. If there’s a lot, then the building doesn’t have good insulation. Which is an issue one can deal with (using window mounted ac units), but the rent should match that.
Not sure what makes sense to ask but my personal experience:
spoiler
I would wanna ask if they recently had any work done to their plumbing for the building. I moved to a new place once but the building was older and just my luck as I had taken up a job that was WFH–surely enough, while I was at home, they had to turn off the water randomly (for hours) throughout a given week and this happened like every other month. They would only give notice via some random paper they slipped through unit front door but otherwise, I had no other way of knowing when this would happen.
Second thing to maybe ask is if they plan to do any kind of work on the parking lot (assuming the building has an actual lot). For me, I didn’t think to ask this but about 3 months in, the building ended up having work done in the parking lot to redo pavement and redraw parking spaces. They forced every tenant to move their car from the lot and as a backup measure, let us use a nearby parking lot that was actually for a restaurant. As you can imagine, this was not a good idea. I was sort of lucky because being WFH meant I could move my car when everybody else was at work but in hindsight, the temporary space they were offering was not enough for the amount of tenants and cars.
You may be in a bit of a rivalry with a neighbor who likes slamming things or having loud music, obviously breaking lease agreement, who makes you wonder why they’ve gotten away with it as long as they have. You record, you report but management does next to nothing. They tell you to your face that the only way they can move forward, is a police report.
This seems to be a common misperception. Results vary based on jurisdiction, but in most places Landlords CAN’T evict anyone for noise. Doesn’t matter what’s in the lease. Eviction is serious and devastating, and not something to be pursued over noise. Even with police complaints (they don’t care) they still can’t evict unless especialky egregious.
Also, noise is a part of life. People have kids and they play. People watch movies on TV. People drop dishes and heavy doors without shocks slam and dogs bark. It’s part of life. Most appartment building aren’t built with sound management in mind making normal everyday sounds a nuisance. To live in an appartment is to have noise of a community. For every bad tennant making noise, there is one curmudgeon filing complaints at butterfly farts.
The solutions:
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Respectful discussion. Calmly let the person know what you are hearing and how it is impacting you and a polite suggestion of what can be done to mittigate this.
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Headphones, earplugs, white noise generators.
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Move to a more suitable place, such as a sound managed appartment or a detached home in the countryside.
I was told, to my face by management, that my peace was to be valued. Everyone’s peace was to be valued.
Maybe someone doesn’t want to wear their headsets all of the time in a place they pay a lot of money for. You’re making it sound like there is no control for anything and just let it be. But someone probably hasn’t told you that, if it can be helped, it should be helped.
Its like you didn’t read anything I said.
That’s cool, because you willfully misinterpreted OP to start with.
The obvious implication with what they’re saying is people doing it egregiously.
“Someone who likes slamming things” doesn’t usually mean people just using their shit reasonably, it’s also not “literally all my neighbors slam things all the time and I have no concept that the cabinets just might be shit in every unit”.
It’s talking about an outlier.
There’s more room to interpret “or who plays loud music” as maybe referring to someone doing a one off thing, but that’s borderline taking OP in bad faith.
There are absolutely people who rant about gnat farts, but if you’ve encountered any significant amount, I’d suggest you’re probably a lot louder than you think you’re being.
“People who like slamming things” from OP is bad faith. Look, rage all you want. The simple fact is no one will evict over noise unless egregious. If it was egregious you’d have multiple complaints from all tennants and to police of city bylaw officers who would issue fines.
Asking cops to police noise is bs. Asking landlords to evict over noise is bs. Go be an old man yelling at clouds.
Rage? I’m not upset. You seem to be really invested in this though. I was being somewhat flippant in my last comment about the problem likely being you if you’ve somehow been the target of multiple noise complaints or if you’ve somehow known multiple people who would want someone evicted for a basic noise compaint, but this really is coming across as something personal for you.
The only person who mentioned eviction is you. And OP clearly isn’t calling the cops on their neighbors, otherwise the landlord saying they needed a police report wouldn’t be anywhere as much of a problem.
If a polite conversation doesn’t work, and a not so polite conversation doesn’t work, and the landlord stepping in doesn’t work, then we’re all adults and can just be increasingly passive agressive.
People have kids and they play.
Lol I used to be those kids.
I kinda run around and be very loud with my older brother at home then my mom told me that the landlord was gonna evict us if we keep making noise so I got so scared lol
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