In the summer of 2013 my job at an advertising agency in London was transferred to New York. I was excited; who wouldn’t grab the opportunity to work in one of the world’s most exciting cities? What’s more, for a short period my company even paid for an apartment for myself and a colleague while we explored different neighbourhoods and found our own place to stay.
When the time came to navigate my way through New York’s real estate market, however, I was shocked to be confronted with prices and practices even London’s letting agents would shy away from.I had previously lived in four different flats and house shares in and around King’s Cross and Angel over a period of six years. My last flat was on a Camden council estate and was a two-bed converted into a three bed, for which I was paying £550 a month before bills.
I thought the capital’s rental market was fast and aggressive – decisions had to be made on the spot and deposits paid quickly in order to secure a place. But that was before I moved to New York. Compared to London it felt like the wild west: I was shown apartments that didn’t seem legal or safe, usually by agents who were utterly clueless.
Learning the jargon was the first hurdle. When I arrived I had no idea what “pre-war” or “rail-road” meant. Pre-war sounds classy; you imagine big parlours and arches – but in reality it means a large room split up to cram in more people. This means one of you will have a sunlit bedroom but the other gets a tiny room with no windows. We saw several pre-war apartments. Some landlords, in an effort to improve the second room, had added a window … looking into another room – not ideal for privacy.
Rail-road style apartments are worse. There is no corridor. Instead, one room leads directly into the next, the ones in the middle having two doors. That means walking through your roommate’s bedroom every time you need to use the bathroom or leave the house.
And if an advert does not have “two true bedrooms” then prepare for the worst. In London two bedrooms means two bedrooms, each with four walls, a window and a door. I wasted so much time in New York being shown apartments where one of the rooms was in fact a corridor. Or have a window looking into the living room, or no window at all. Sometimes it would be no more than a glorified closet.
I learned that “walk-up” is also something to be wary of. It means no elevator, and stairs are no fun if you live in a high rise and have heavy shopping bags or a pile of laundry – New Yorkers don’t have washing machines in their homes. All this is before you even start thinking about the hassle of moving furniture in or out. I discovered that if an agency had taken professional photos, this usually meant something was wrong with the flat and they could not get it rented.
Eventually we found a place, and once we agreed to take it we were whisked to an office and told to put in an application. This could only be completed if we could give them a cheque for the first and last month’s rent, and our guarantor’s bank statement.
In New York the standard is for landlords to request evidence that you earn more than 40 times the monthly rent to prove you can comfortably afford it. I wasn’t even close. No one outside the US is allowed to be a guarantor, so I had to ask our company’s vice president to be mine.
There was no guarantee our application would be successful – multiple applications are accepted at once and you cannot be sure you will get back all of your money if you are unsuccessful. Although the deposit and rent are returned if you don’t secure the apartment, most realtors will keep some of the money to cover their admin charges, including the cost of background checks. I doubt very much that the background checks were even carried out.
by Alex Wolynski, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty
