Category: Case Studies

Buried deep within the bowels of Craigslist lies a little-visited section called "Housing Wanted." You might think that it's an ideal sort of situation. Tenants post the specifics of their perfect apartment and landlords come to them. In some sections of the world where there's a lot more rental housing than there are renters this is actually the case. In Chicago it is the pit of despair. It's where tenants who cannot find housing through any other means wind up when they've exhausted all other options, along with a few newcomers who remain unaware about how Chicago rental market works. In contrast to the very busy "apartments for rent" section which sees about 2000 new posts a day, the Housing Wanted section gets about 10-20 posts per day, many of them miscategorized.

The authors of the posts in "apartments wanted" have usually been turned down for several apartments already. Faced with repeated rejections many of them will put in their postings the reasons why they have been unsuccessful thus far. An analysis of this section will give us a pretty clear idea of what it takes to completely fail an apartment hunt. And I do mean fail - if you are posting here you will not find housing until you change either yourself or your search criteria. Continue reading Patrolling the Pit of Despair: Craigslist’s “Apartments Wanted” Section

Every once in a while we get questions from our readers about the finer details of renting. Some are from tenants, others from landlords, and still others from parents, attorneys and agents. Today we thought we’d answer some of those questions in our first advice column! If you have a question you’d like us to answer in a future installment of Dear RentConfident, leave it in a comment below, or send us a message through our contact form.

Dear RentConfident: We live in a building with property managers who are very sweet to us when we run into them in person. However, every time we make a request of them in person we get a nasty letter from them afterwards telling us that we're causing harm to their property. I've spoken with my neighbors and they're in agreement with me that the management is totally rude in their letters to us. We have done nothing to violate the terms of our lease. Why are their letters to us so harsh? - The Ink is Bleeding, South Loop Continue reading Dear RentConfident: Why are my Landlord’s letters so rude?

Last Friday I posted a fun apartment research mystery that I solved for a RentConfident customer. I left the ending of the story unfinished, hoping that you would enjoy the mental puzzle of figuring out my reasoning. When we left off, I had determined that my customer's prospective new landlord was lying to her. Today I will explain how I knew. You should probably go read the first part before you read what follows, although if you're the type to read the ending of a mystery before the beginning I won't fault you. As before, names, dates and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Warning, spoilers ahead!