Category: Renting Safely

People who are feeling some sort of extreme emotion generally do not make good financial decisions. This is why you shouldn't go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. It's why the worst types of lawyers chase ambulances. It's why stores like invest huge sums of money into detecting when their customers are going through major life changes like the birth of a child, a graduation or a retirement.

Choosing a place to live is a decision that is often emotionally loaded as it is, and techniques used by real estate agents to market a property are designed to dampen any logical thought processes you may bring to the table. But housing is a huge financial investment. The choice of housing should not just be based on emotion but with logical thought towards your safety, your comfort and your bank account.

Even if you're normally an emotional decision maker, you need to make sure that when you view an apartment that you are looking with your head as well as your heart. Today's apartment viewing technique for renters will reset your emotions for every apartment showing. It will ensure that you are approaching every showing with the same amount of thought and clarity no matter how your day has been or who is with you.

All it takes is a measuring tape and seven measurements. Of course, these measurements will give you some nice numbers, but the process of actually pausing to reel out the tape will lead you to think about some important details that you should be noticing beyond feet and inches. You could use other metrics instead, but I've found that a measuring tape is a cheap, portable, and neutral way to show an agent that you're serious about the task at hand while not seeming hostile.

Here's what to measure.

1. Freight elevator or Stairs

Why? It makes you think about getting in and out. A common reason why people get off to a bad start at their new apartment is the sheer horror of moving in. Carrying all your stuff in and out is hard enough without any of it getting stuck in the stairs or the freight elevator.

But apartment building traffic routes are not just a "moving in" kind of thing. They're something you will deal with every time you leave, every time you come home, every time you walk the dog, head to the laundry room or bring in the groceries. It's also something that you'll definitely encounter in case of a fire. Lobbies may be pretty but once you move in you'll probably come and go through the back door quite often. Might as well see what that back route looks like.

Measure this: If the building has an elevator, get the width of the doors. If not, go to a corner of the stairs and measure the shortest distance from wall to wall (or floor to ceiling). Continue reading Seven Measurements That Will Help You Choose the Right Apartment

It's Friday, right? I got the publication date right this time? Great!

So it's May. Chicago residents may have noticed a marked change in the weather recently. The outside temperatures shot up by about 20F degrees this week with an accompanying increase in humidity. If you're one of the many renters living in buildings with central air conditioning, good for you. This is not your article. This one is for those renters who have moved into vintage apartments without central AC since the end of the summer last year. You guys probably spent the last 48 hours or so contemplating how to install a window air conditioner. Here's what you need to know.

Do You Really Need AC?

While in record years the high temperatures in Chicago have capped out at about 111F degrees, the average high even in midsummer is somewhere in the 80s. That's really not all that bad, and in other areas of the country it's downright chilly. The difference here is our high humidity, which in turn creates high heat indexes - that means it feels hotter than it really is. Continue reading The Chicago Renters’ Guide to Window Air Conditioners

It's the month of itemized deductions! Since I've been working on my income taxes I'm in a mood for thinking about nickels, dimes, and unanticipated costs. We're also in the run up to May 1, Chicago's busiest moving day of the year, so I figured we could extend that financial focus to the blog and talk about moving expenses.

Some renters undertake moving on a whim, switching apartments for a change of pace. Others move because the landlord has raised the rent above the actual worth of the apartment. The rest move for more obvious necessities: changes in income, lifestyle or occupation. No matter the reason, few stop to consider how much a move will actually cost them, relying instead on imagined ballpark numbers.

When I worked as an agent I would counsel my clients to set aside the equivalent of three months' rent for moving expenses, a high figure that surprised many of them. For those with weak credit scores or problems in their rental history I would up that total to as high as nine months of rent. But even that is an arbitrary figure that does not apply to every move. Today we'll look at all the questions you should consider when deciding whether or not a new apartment is something you can really afford. As always, this list is not exhaustive, but I did try to be pretty thorough.

The Search

• Are you moving to a new town? What will it cost to get there for showings? Transit costs, hotel costs.
• Are you moving to a town where tenants have to pay broker fees?
• Will you be doing long days of back-to-back apartment tours? Will you need to buy food?
• How will you be getting from apartment to apartment? Will you need public transit fare? Taxi/Uber fare? Parking meter fees? Will you need to rent a car?

Continue reading Calculating the True Cost of Moving

Wow, it's been over a year since the last installment of the Questions series!

Security of personal information has been in the news lately. Companies have been getting their privacy policies in order as the deadline for compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation approaches. More and more sites are warning you that they use cookies to store information. Green padlocks have been popping up all over in response to Google's crackdown on unencrypted websites. Facebook is in hot water for providing user data to Cambridge Analytica.

Renters entering the housing market this year will be doing so after months of fear mongering about data security, identity theft and compromised passwords. They will come up against lengthy rental applications that ask for enormous amounts of personal data, leading many to wonder exactly how landlords, who often operate their businesses out of spare bedrooms and converted storefronts, are equipped to safeguard that information.

It's become quite common and expected for landlords to pull credit reports on tenants. To do so they need your name, birth date, social security number and most recent address. This is certainly enough information to steal your identity. If you're working with an agency, the agency will ask for that same data and provide it to landlords with every application you complete. Even so, renters who are desperate to be accepted for an apartment rarely bother to ask their agents and prospective landlords about the practices they follow in the office to keep personal renter information secure. With that in mind, here are some questions you should ask any prospective landlord or agent before you fill out that application.

As is the case with all installments in the Questions series, you should not ask every question on this list or you risk being marked as a hostile applicant. Choose one or two, and only go into further depth if you get answers that make you feel uneasy.

For All:

1. What screening practices do you use for employees who handle financial information and credit reports?
2. How long do you retain application information and credit reports? How about rental history? (Unless an applicant is suspected of using stolen information, data should only be retained until the tenant moves in. If the landlord wants to file suit for fraud against a tenant using falsified information, they can keep evidence on file for up to five years. Payment information and maintenance request logs can be kept for up to 10 years from expiration of the final lease in Illinois.)
3. If you keep paper copies of credit reports in the office, how do you secure them?
4. Are digitized versions of credit reports stored on a web-facing computer? If so, what security practices do you follow for that computer?
5. Is there any point in your data chain where personal financial information is transferred to an employee's laptop, mobile phone or other portable device?
6. Is there any point in your data chain where credit reports or applications are sent over potentially unencrypted methods such as FAX, email or unencrypted websites?
7. If you encountered an application using obviously stolen information, what would you do?
8. What systems do you have in place for destroying sensitive information when you're done with it? (Paper copies should be burned or pulverized. Disk drives should be destroyed.)
9. Do you pull entire consumer credit reports or do you use a service that only provides a score? (Score-only is safer from a data standpoint, but if a landlord can see the full report it may allow them to be more lenient with people who have weak scores due to unrelated issues.)
10. Do use contact information obtained from applicants for any reason other than processing the application? (Marketing newsletters, selling to advertisers, etc.)
11. If I asked you to delete my file when you're done with it, would you do so? (The US has no "right to be forgotten" as the EU does, so this is entirely up to the whims of each business.)
12. If you accept applications through your website, does your web developer or any other outside company still have access to the database?

For Landlords Only:

1. How much proof of identity do you require from other landlords before disclosing a tenant's rental history? (Landlords will often call previous landlords directly to verify a tenant's rental history. It's a common weak link in data security.)
2. How many people have access to tenant applications and credit reports?
3. If you accept online rent payments, what service do you use to process them?
4. If you accept credit card payments for rent, is there any point in the payment chain where your employees can see a tenant's entire unmasked credit card number?
5. Do you allow renters to provide their own credit reports? (They absolutely should not, as this encourages identity thieves to use stolen information to obtain apartments.)
6. How secure is the office where you keep tenant files?
7. If tenants have access to online accounts, can anyone in the company or at third party web design companies see their username and password?

For Agencies:

1. How much data do you provide to landlords when I apply for an apartment?
2. Do you verify a landlord's data security practices before approving them as clients who can receive credit reports?
3. What sort of training do your application processors get in best practices for data security?
4. Does this office have any licensed Realtors or mortgage brokers working in-house? (These businesses have more restrictive laws governing their data retention and must submit to annual third party audits.)

If after asking these questions you get answers that make you uncomfortable, that does not necessarily mean that the landlord is a bad landlord. They may be behind the technological times but this is not uncommon within the industry. Bad data security practices shouldn't put you off from applying for that perfect apartment.

You can, however, respond to that discomfort by writing "call for information" in the social security number and birth date fields instead of the requested information. When the call comes in, make it very clear that if they write down the information it should be on a separate piece of paper from your application that bears no other identifying info and gets shredded immediately after use.