On The Hunt

I haven't really had to look for a new place to live since the fall of 2009. My freshman and sophomore years of school I lived in the dorms, and the only thing to do then was figure out which room in which dorm to live in. I didn't even have to figure out who to live with those years because my randomly chosen freshman year roommate is awesome so it made complete sense to live with him again the year after. He was also a big part of how I found my off-campus apartment for junior and senior year; his sister lived in an apartment with her friends who were all graduating at the end of the year. Their apartment had a good location, lots of space, not too expensive, etc. They put in a good word with the landlord, and the next thing I know, the lease was signed. We ended up moving to the downstairs apartment in the same townhouse for our senior year when the landlord moved out because it was MUCH nicer, huge kitchen, etc. So the point is, I'm used to things just kind of working out without much effort when looking for a home. This time, things weren't so simple.

Part of my relocation package for work includes assistance from a local realtor. Basically I got to tell her what we wanted in an apartment, the areas we were considering, how much we wanted to pay, and basically anything else that we cared about. She would then head off to find anything that matched our criteria and give us a list of places to consider. My roommates and I also did some searching on our own just to get a good idea for ourselves what was available.

One thing I did not anticipate was the scarcity of places we were looking for. I'm living with 2 other friends from college, so we naturally looked for 3-bedroom apartments. It turns out these are a rare commodity in the downtown Seattle apartment complexes. Even the more expensive places had no vacancies, and we were forced to expand our search to include areas further from the city as well as townhouses. I remember getting an email from the realtor saying how a vast majority of the places she'd been calling had no 3BR apartments, and that we may want to consider a 2BR where 2 of us live in 1 room. In a word - nope.

I had a trip to Seattle planned for the end of June to look at various places so that we would make a final decision for when I moved in late July. We managed to find a couple places with apartments, as well as some townhouses. That said, I was still a little worried about finding something that we would like. The first place we looked at was my favorite going into the trip. It was right next to one of the shuttles that I could take to work, had awesome amenities, and just seemed pretty solid overall. The problem was that there are at least 3 other groups scheduled to see that apartment later the same day. Our realtor advised that if we waited until the end of the day after the others had seen the apartment, it would likely be off the market. This was not a push for us to take this apartment, just warning that if we were going to seriously consider it, it would have to be today.

Luckily, we had a couple hours to see some other places for comparison. While there has nothing particularly bad about the other apartments, each one lacked something that the first one had. The next one we went to was not as large. The one after that was really far away. I had a gut feeling that the original place we saw was going to be our best bet, so I decided to go back there and hand in an application. I learned that part of applying for an apartment includes a monetary deposit, some of which pays for taking the apartment off the market so that others cannot apply while the management company performs background and credit checks on you. Assuming nothing goes wrong, you get the least to sign and return.

You would think that my problems were over after choosing this place. It's important to mention that, at the time, one of my roommates was on a month-long trip across Southeast Asia where his access to internet was somewhat limited. He knew that he would need to be online during those days, but it still made things a little tough at times. The first hurdle was getting him to fill out all the info for the application since each resident needs to do one. We ended up having his dad do most of it for him since it was enough for him to have internet, and there was not real way for him to print, sign, and scan it. Before I left Seattle at the end of the week, though, all the applications were in and now we just had to wait for the lease.

I planned an extra day in my trip out there in case we needed it to look at more places. Since that was no longer necessary, I got to do a little adventuring around the city. I also stopped at the University of Washington where I may take some classes over the next couple years. This is a BIG if - I want to stay as far away from school as I can for a while. I also got to see a Mariners game for $35 and was 4 rows from the field (read: they're not a very good team at the moment).

Seattle Public Library... wat.

Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at UW

Inside the C.S. building (much nicer than I'm used to)

The view that $35 gets you at Safeco Field

Ichiro is actually no longer on the Mariners. Glad I got to see him at least once.

In the end, we signed the lease and started making plans to move. There were a few more hurdles to get over for that, but you'll hear all about that in the next post in which I display for affinity for planning.