DC Housing CUHRAZINESS!

For the longest time I've been meaning to blog about how crazy the DC housing scene has felt this past month.  I've been extremely lucky to be staying with an amazingly generous friend that I roomed with last summer.  For the second summer in a row he's temporarily given up his bedroom for my use, insisting that it's "no problem" because he's out of town a lot and when he is in DC he's fine with staying with his boyfriend.  Furthermore, in lieu of me paying him rent, he's asked that I donate the same amount of money to an animal shelter in Costa Rica that he spent some time at recently.  He repeatedly says of the owner of the shelter, "she can use the money more than I can."  Seriously, this man has a heart of gold.

Now, regarding the housing craziness, well for one thing there are the prices.  I'm relatively new to the renting game so to speak but the prices in the District are at least comparable to the SF Bay Area and I keep hearing from friends from other parts of the country that either area's prices are ridiculous.  I won't get into numbers, but yeah it's ugly.

Faced with this challenge but armed with my relatively easy-going personality I figured I'd go with a group house or some sort of shared housing situation.  Little did I know how competitive that gets.  Maybe it's because of the bad economy that people aren't buying homes but instead flooding the rental market with competition.  I've been to countless open houses in the past few weeks and every time I see a steady stream of would-be renters coming for tours and putting their info down as interested.  It's exhausting for everyone involved, landlords included.

That moves me to my next point, the terrible response rate of Craigslist posters.  I have to attribute it to the overwhelming number of inquiries each post must be generating that exhausted households and landlords must be giving up at some point with trying to respond to each inquiry and/or notify them when a room is no longer available.

I literally was walking to an apartment to view it having already set up an appointment to do so, when I called to check the address and was met with a voicemail machine saying that the place had already been rented out.  Apparently the landlord couldn't be bothered to cancel the appointment(s) they had set up already.  Rude, but sadly I can understand why, if not accept that as a reasonable excuse.

I've had at least four close calls where I thought I had a place only to be told I hadn't made the cut, or that I had called to commit only hours after someone else had already secured the place.  One time I even viewed a place, took a walk to think things over and when I called two hours later to commit I was told someone had put down the deposit right after I left.  Sigh.

Thanks to my friend I'm not homeless yet, in fact there are some positive developments in that regard that are still in flux so I can't share them yet.  I have a lot of friends coming to DC now as interns and the like that are looking for summer housing which is also making things crazy as I do my best to help them.  I've heard some crazy suggestions so far on what can be dones to secure housing, including overbidding for a room during the open house process, which I think is ridiculous considering the posts are for a stated rate, not soliciting best offers.  I think it just corrupts the whole process, but that's just my opinion.

In any case, my advice when seeking housing in DC be it temporary or long term leases is if you don't have infinite amounts of money, have back up options/couches to crash on and leverage your networks for housing options.  Two out of the four really close calls I've had with housing were the result of networking through friends rather than traditional Craigslist postings.  Networking for housing options is more likely to yield an actual response instead of waiting and wondering if anyone's read your Craigslist email.

Well, wish me luck, and best of luck to all of you out there in search of DC housing!