Almost a month living in New York, what an amazing experience!
In my last post I wrote about all the «»to-do» that I had in my agenda, now I can say that all of them have been completed, and so I will try to help you with the most difficult task from my point of view, apartment search in New York.
First of all if you are coming as «single» at New York, you will probably afford a shared apartment (bedrooms from $500 to $1500), if so, this post is not for you (sorry).
But if you are coming with your couple or with a friend, I think my experience will be good for you.
We started searching for apartments from our local countries, about 20 days before arriving.
After visiting more than 30 studios/1 bed apartment with a some real estate agents (please make sure they are licensed by asking them their license number) I realize that you actually can live in Manhattan for about $2300/month, the problem is that those affordable apartments have (almost always) a downside, after an intense search I filtered some of the most interesting apartments within my budget, but after several visits none of them fitted in my preferences: No A/C (Highly recommended for NYC), moldy carpets in the corridors, a nice 12th floor studio with no elevator, hallways described by Stephen King in his novels, noisy pipelines…
Web search apartments: zillow, streeteasy, and Facebook groups as «gypsy housing» (very useful for subletting)
And dont forget about agent fees (from 15% of anual rent to 1 month of rent as fee), and as you are probably new in the country, you wont have credit record neither pay stubs yet (most of the times are requested as guarantee)
Two days before starting at Nelligan White architects, we discover an interested concept in Brooklyn, new residential affordable buildings, including common living rooms, games rooms, bike storage, doorman 24/7, and most of them are managed by the same property, so you wont have to pay agent fees, and if you are a good deal maker you can even skip the credit record process.
New residential affordable buildings in Brooklyn: Caesura, Flatbush ave 1, Ashland, Bond 33
I highly recommend you to take a look into this building concept.
Talk to you soon
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