Then one day, after a real estate agent brought us back to her office-after she had just showed us a beautiful apartment for $1,350 and expected us to sign a lease-we sat staring at the wall behind her desk where there was a giant sign posted saying TWO-BEDROOM RAILROADS FOR $850. "Now we are actually looking for a two-bedroom for $1,000 a month." A few days later we said, "Now we're actually looking for a two-bedroom for $950 per month." When we discovered this game ( which is still in play today) we changed our tune each time we talked to one of the realtors. When we weren't biting at any of these places, the real estate agents reluctantly began showing us lower priced places - and always with the cautionary phrase - "You need to carry a gun to live in 'that' neighborhood."Īnd it dawned on me, they were trying to scare and panic us into taking a higher priced apartment-not too mention what a racist and classist remark this was. There were in fact, a lot of apartments available in our price range, but realtors were keeping the pressure on to get us (and all their clients) to rent THE most expensive apartment they could possible get us to sign for. (Why did we choose those three? Probably because they were the only ones who returned our calls.)Įven though we stated our price was $1,100 (which in reality was a stretch for us), we were consistently shown apartments priced between $1,200 and $1,600. Once we focused our search on the L line, we worked consistently with three different brokers. So what looked like a stop WAY out on the subway map, was actually a 15 minute ride to Union Square. We also discovered, by looking at at a true scale map, the train stops along the L line were quite close together. Our primary reason for doing so was because we weren't sure where our jobs would be located in the future and the L train hit every major train line in Manhattan from east-to-west. We ultimately focused our search along the L train subway line. For nearly a year, not one single person ever said anything but, "You will never get a two-bedroom-not even a one-bedroom-for that price." It didn't matter if it was a friend, co-worker, random person on the street, I never heard the word "NEVER" said so many times to me on a daily basis. We knew we probably weren't going to find anything in Manhattan, so we started looking in Queens and Brooklyn.Įveryone, EVERYone I told about our apartment size and price specifications said we would NEVER get that. Our goal was a two-bedroom for $1,100 per month. There was so much competition for housing, you couldn't take a shit without hiring a broker, let alone rent an apartment. It was the height of the DotCom bubble and I was looking for an apartment with a former girlfriend.
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