There are two ways to find an apartment in New York. You either use a broker, or you don’t.
Brokers are knowledgeable, expensive and widely regarded as totally evil. They are typically pushy, no-nonsense individuals for whom Time Is Money. They live a frantic day-to-day life scampering up and down Manhattan finagling their way into apartments. I have witnessed brokers lying outrageously to jaded block caretakers/doormen (the “supers”) and in one case actually credit-carding the lock in order to show me the property. For the flat-hunting period you are drawn into this pattern of behaviour.
The evil is necessary because competition for apartments is fierce. Same-day applications are needed for the good apartments.
The real evil is in the cost: a broker calculates your yearly rental and demands 15% of it. This generally works out at 1500-2000 pounds which you simply have to hand over.
The alternative – to dodge the broker fee – is to sit in a web cafe endlessly refreshing craigslist and phoning randoms to arrange viewings. Amusingly 75% of the randoms will turn out to be brokers in disguise. This approach is definitely cheaper but requires economy-size portions of (i) time and (ii) patience.
The following map-o-tron shows the three apartments I am currently choosing between (on Manhattan) and also Caitlin’s place in Brooklyn. You can drag and zoom and stuff, wowzers!
The northmost two apartments are in Chelsea (and are really nice). The lower one is in super-cool SoHo but the street looks noisy as hell.
[map removed]
04-Oct-07 at 5:32 pm | Permalink
CHEL-SEA, CHEL-SEA, HO-MO, HO-MO . . .
(strange little dance)
05-Oct-07 at 4:46 pm | Permalink
If you are in NY on the 28th Boris & Damon and Naomi are playing the wonderful Bowery Ballroom. If not you should defo check out Prefuse 73 in November…
Go go Upper East!!
05-Oct-07 at 5:53 pm | Permalink
Upper east? Goodness, you’d think the boy was rich or something. I need a sofa. Nice and big and squashy. Pls take this into account.