NYC APARTMENT HUNTING (w/ rent prices + tips!)

[Music] hey guys and welcome to these long awaited New York apartment hunting video I have been tingling to make this video tingling is a weird word it sounds like I have to pee out this video um I am an itching to make this video for a while because I just love apartment hunting I love looking at spaces I love thinking about prices and what's a good deal even in like my free time I will go to open houses and be like that [ __ ] who eats the free food and pisses off real estate agents because I just love looking at real estate so today I'm gonna walk you guys through the entire in New York apartment hunting a process I toured over ten apartments so I'm gonna show you all of them give you my thoughts and I'm also going to include exact rent prices and locations because that's what makes one of these [ __ ] videos useful to begin with I know it's very expensive I know it can feel personally offensive when people pay a lot of money in rent but I want to live here while I'm young I'm very lucky to be able to afford it I know it's thanks to you guys and yeah I just wanted to be transparent about rent because I don't think it should be a big [ __ ] taboo don't roast me thank you so Before we jump into my actual apartment tours I wanted to give you guys some background on the New York real estate market because I have found that it is so different from anywhere else in the United States first of all rental units in New York just go really [ __ ] fast one of the first apartments I toured in New York I showed up on time to the open house and somebody else had already showed up ten minutes early and submitted their application and the apartment was gone by the time the open house opened in New York you have to be ready to decide literally where you're gonna live within like 20 minutes or a couple hours of looking at a place what is a good time to start apartment hunting in New York I would recommend to start looking at apartments online around six weeks to a month before you're ready to move now six weeks out you're probably not going to actually be able to rent any of the apartments that you look at but I always think it's a good idea to do some research online to get a feel for how much space you get for certain prices what different neighborhoods are looking like so when you actually go apartment hunting you're not getting screwed over and you know what's a good deal and what is a rip off street easy is the main site where people list rental in New York you can also look on Zillow but I just found street easy to be better organized and it was a lot easier to contact the agents and arrange times to view apartments so that was the main one that I ended up using then I'd recommend coming out to New York around 2 to 3 weeks before you're ready to move in that's what I did I came out here January 17th I apartment hunted right after I landed in New York and I was ready to sign a lease starting on February 1st not being said if you aren't familiar with New York I would recommend either starting by coming out here and subletting an apartment for a couple months or making a visit in advance and really taking a look at a bunch of different neighborhoods at different times of day visiting New York feels very different than living here and the neighborhoods that you might love when you visit you're like ooh Times Square baby trust me you don't want to live in Times Square if you're not sure it's always better to be on the safer side and sublet a place first before making a year-long commitment to a lease fall and winter are generally considered offseason in New York where there are fewer rental units available so it can be harder to find the exact type of unit that you're looking for but because fewer people move in the winter there's also lower demand meaning that you can get a much better price on an apartment I would say apartments were renting for like 10 to 15% cheaper in the winter than they were in the summer in the summer there are a lot more options available on the market but I've heard that it's also very very competitive because everybody likes moving in the summer the weather is nice people will come up to New York post-grad which means that you have to be ready to sign a lease even faster and you end up paying a premium on rent because there's so much demand so how much money do you need saved up in order to move to New York I would recommend saving four months of rent before you move out to New York which I know is a lot of money but it will go very very fast here first of all when you go tour an apartment and you are ready to put down an application there is a twenty dollar application fee and they will also ask for usually a month's worth of rent upfront as kind of a good-faith deposit while they approve your application in order to hold the apartment if you don't get approve you will get that money back if you do get approved that will go towards your security deposit then if you do get approved for the apartment you'll have to pay first month's rent and a broker's fee which is such a little [ __ ] honestly basically what a broker is is the person who arranges open houses who shows the apartment who has you signed the leases so as a tenant you have to pay them for their services most broker fees are between one month of rent and 15% of annual rent which I personally think is such a ripoff but that's real estate baby I guess in good news though they did just pass a law in New York that the landlord now has to pay the broker's fee I think it should go in effect to the next couple months and that would be great news for tenants because it would mean that you wouldn't have to pay several thousand dollars more just to get an apartment but it is possible that rent will just go up because landlords will then incorporate the broker's fee into the monthly rent price so yeah turns out landlords still have control over everything in the end we love to see it New York is also very strict about the income you need to qualify for an apartment pretty much every landlord will require that your yearly salary is 40 times the monthly rent price most apartments will also accept guarantors within the United States but your guarantor is yearly salary has to be 80 times rent which is a lot my final tip is to make sure you come with your paperwork prepared I will list on the screen now a list of all the documents you need in order to apply for an apartment here it was best if you gather them up front at front because basically once you find an apartment you like you will put down your application fee and your good faith deposit and that will usually buy you around two days to submit all of your application materials so it's just best if you have them all up front you can submit them right away rather than potentially losing out on an apartment because you couldn't find your tax return or you couldn't get a letter from your landlord in time and yeah it's always good to be prepared the Girl Scouting me talking all right so now let's get into the stuff that you guys have probably been waiting for this entire video which is the actual apartment tours so I was looking for a studio or small one-bedroom in downtown Manhattan for under $2,500 since I work from home and I make videos I really prioritize having good natural light a quiet apartment and some nice little vintage details because I am a vintage ho so my first appointment was in East Village the East Village is historically an immigrant neighborhood like us all of New York is technically historically an immigrant neighborhood because we're all immigrants then in the 60s and 70s it became a center of like punk rock counterculture I personally liked it because it has a very like old-school New York feel mixed with a lot of young artsy people Jesus I just described gentrification didn't I so the first apartment that I visited was a studio in East Village but it was a pretty spacious one at that there was definitely enough room for a bed and a desk and a little corner to film in which is pretty much what I needed in an apartment I also really liked that it had high ceilings it made the space feel very spacious it also had a separate kitchen which was kind of nice because a lot of apartments in New York will have the kitchen like as part of the main studio area and it's kind of nice to have that separate space to cook and I keep all of that kitchen clutter the bathroom was also the bathroom it did the job I'd had quite a long hallway which was a little bit awkward but I'm not complaining there was enough space for like some extra shoe storage the windows were pretty big so it did get a good amount of light but they faced north before this round of apartment hunting I really had never thought about the way that my windows faced I didn't care I was like it's a window what's the difference I learned the hard way in my last apartment that north-facing windows never get direct sunlight because of the way the Sun rises it basically made filming videos so hard because I would have to use studio lights pretty much all the time in order to get enough light to film with video and especially during the winter where I was at home all the time I just like never fell to the Sun on my face it made me so sad and it made me constantly want to get out of my apartment so this time around I was kind of a stickler for getting apartment windows that faced south which would get direct sunlight for the majority of the day or at least east or west where they would get a couple hours of direct sunlight another thing that I always look for in apartments is just like the vibes some apartments you walk in and you're like ooh this is a weird a weird place like I couldn't imagine myself living here but this one felt super homey although I might have been biased because the furniture was just really nice after I toured the apartment I was also allowed to go up on the rooftop now the vast majority of pre-war buildings in New York will not let you go on the roof because it's like not zoned to hold human beings and the landlords don't want to get sued so it was really special that this one had a rooftop it obviously was not particularly well finished but it was really gorgeous to see the view of New York and it would just be really fun to like be able to have friends up there to get drunk and go up on the roof to even shoot videos up there however I did look around and I noticed that there was an empty lot that they were starting construction on right next to the building which would be a concern in terms of shooting videos a day after I toured this apartment I did ask the landlord for an application just cuz I got like good vibes from the building but he said the apartment had already been rented just cuz it was such a good price but it's okay because ultimately because of the north-facing windows and potential construction nearby it probably wouldn't have been the best fit for me as a video person anyway the next apartment I saw was a 1-bedroom in East Village for $2,300 what I loved about this apartment was the vintage details around the windows and this absolutely gorgeous fireplace I could really envision this as like the perfect backdrop for fashion videos through this doorway there was another huge room but unfortunately it didn't have any natural light this is like such a New York thing but there were windows in the living room that directly faced brick so it was essentially just another wall for this apartment it wasn't as big of a deal because there were other windows that let light in but it didn't mean there was a lot of square footage that I couldn't fully take advantage of because I couldn't fill there because it was so dark but it could have been a good place to like put my bed and have more like a cozy night time 5 the kitchen was quite small but had a nice modern finishes as did the bathroom which actually also had a full-size tub which is very very rare for New York out of all the apartments I saw I think this was my favorite aesthetically however this apartment was [ __ ] loud it faced a multi-lane street and the glass was just really thin it was not soundproof properly it sounded like I was there on the street another concern I had was I could occasionally hear the pipes like squealing and rattling and some apartments if they're not well maintained when somebody showers or turns on their heat the pipes will like squeal and scream at you Ross your man Jake for me if I had to record a video I just like wouldn't be able to do it and it would be really frustrating you know like getting set up for work for the day and then the pipes are just like hahaha that was my best pipe impersonation I wouldn't have been able to do my job if I lived there so yeah that kind of stuff I didn't end up applying to that one my next appointment was in Kelsey which if I had to put it in a nutshell I would say that it is a little bit of a bougie ER kind of like the type of person who owns an art gallery or is featured in Architectural Digest 5 there's a lot of art galleries fancy restaurants and it's also a large center of lgbtq+ culture in New York it's also a great place if you need to commute because it's so close to all these different subway lines I didn't think personally it was the best fit for me in terms of neighborhood but it is still like a really really good location and I really like this apartment this studio with a couple floors up and a walk-up and the actual studio space was quite small it could pretty much fit a bed and then a very small desk if you got the location just right and that's it so for me that was definitely pushing it a little bit especially because I have to work from home however the thing that I wanted to check out in this apartment was the beautiful outdoor space this Terrace face the back of the building and it was actually up on the third floor so I got a decent amount of light but it was also like so nicely tucked in a little Cove of buildings and I don't know I felt like I was like wrapped in buildings it was really lovely the outdoor space was just so freakin beautiful that I was really considering it but ultimately it came down to a value calculation of do I want to spend six months cramped inside a tiny apartment where I can barely fit a desk in a bed and then have six months with this glorious outdoor space or would I rather have an apartment where I have enough space year-round and maybe no outdoor space so I ended up not applying to that apartment but it was a really lovely space my next apartment was back in the East Village it was a 1-bedroom for around $2,000 I forget the exact price on this one but it was a lot of space for the price it was kind of a suspiciously good deal when I had seen this online I really liked the large windows and this little archway detail that it had in the middle however what I didn't see on the listing is that this apartment had like a valley in the middle it's hard to tell in this video but the floors were so slanted inwards it was literally like a dent inside the apartment the broker was trying to convince me she said the last tenants put like books underneath their couch to level out their furniture and like they made it work but I think a problem for me more than the fact that the floorboards were slanted is that that is a sign of a really badly maintained building basically over time hardwood floors will cave in but in order for hardwood floors to cave in that severely the landlord had not updated that apartment in probably like 50 a hundred years like it was really really slanted if a unit is like that badly neglected I think that it could point to larger issues with the building and it turns out that I was right because as I was walking down from that apartment there was this eighty year old lady who came out of another one of the units in the building and she was like did you just go to an open house please do not live here I have bedbugs I have contacted the landlord they won't do anything about it it is disgusting here please do not move in I was like oh my god this is New York baby look out for those red flags if you're getting weird vibes from a building if it seems like it hasn't been well taken care of it probably has not been at this point I was getting a little demoralized so I decided to check out this apartment just for the hell of it I kind of had just gotten obsessed with this apartment on street easy and I knew it was too expensive for me but I really wanted to check it out anyway because I happened to be in New York and in the neighborhood so I was like my god this apartment was on the border of Greenwich and West Village which I would describe as like the East villages bougie or older brother there are some of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York hence this apartment being expensive as [ __ ] to put it in a nutshell when you think of where a girl in a rom-com lives this is the neighborhood it's so like romantic quiet the architecture is universally beautiful so this apartment I mean I don't even know what to say about this apartment because like I knew off the bat that I wasn't going to get it because it was so expensive but um let's just take a moment to add rule over this place okay look at those windows look at that chandelier look vintage details and most importantly look at that [ __ ] terrace this place have like the most gigantic private Terrace it was overlooking a park so it had like sweeping New York City views it was lovely it was so lovely this apartment is so nice I showed so many people the videos of this apartment cuz I was just like look at it look at how nice it is I still would daydream about that apartment sometimes anyways on to the next apartment that I saw my next apartment was in Chinatown now I kind of had mixed feelings about living in Chinatown because on one hand I felt like such a gentrified like going in there and looking at a nice loft apartment when there are like grandmas and grandpas who have lived there their entire lives but I also felt this need to like show my appreciation for Chinatown I think there definitely still is a stigma in New York for living in Chinatown and even this listing was listed as Little Italy online instead of Chinatown as like a way to get more people to come to the listing which is kind of shitty so I don't know it's complicated but that's where this apartment was so anyways this apartment it was a little bit over budget for me it was $2,600 but my like heart dropped when I walked into this place it was so so gorgeous this was the first apartment I'd seen that had south-facing windows and oh my god it was so so nice seeing and feeling that direct Sun come through the window I also just really vibed with the layout of this apartment it just like made sense to me I could definitely envision the bedroom being super nice and cozy and just curling up there and then having a workspace out in the main living room and shooting outfit videos against this brick wall they were also in the process of refinishing the apartment so all of the finishes on the kitchen in the bathroom were super super nice yeah this was just it was like the perfect space for me I was so so so so close to applying to this place but as I was getting my phone to send the broker the apartment fee the upstairs neighbor started walking around and I could hear like every single step the ceilings were just insanely thin and then the upstairs neighbor also turned on the TV and even though it was that like a medium volume I could hear everything going on the TV I was like maybe I could make this work like if my upstairs neighbor works a nine-to-five I can just film during the day while they're gone but then it's like what if they work from home what if there's a holiday and they come home what if they are just like loud is fine and I can't film anything in this apartment so once again the fact that I have to film videos to my apartment kind of [ __ ] this one over for me so moving onwards we have apartment number [ __ ] like 500 I've looked at so many of these this was quite the mystery unit a couple days into my apartment honey came up on street easy and it didn't have any photos which you normally it's like a horrible sign but I happen to have some extra time so I decided to check out this apartment this one was two thousand two hundred and ninety five dollars it was a studio in East Village and it actually turned out to be a really good option the reason they didn't have photos was because they were renovating it versus the apartment just being ugly as [ __ ] so it turned out to be pretty promising they were in the process of renovating the kitchen and giving it new finishes and they had also recently like torn down the wall that had separated the kitchen before so the apartment seemed a lot more open and spacious which was definitely a good move this apartment was also so tall that it had a little storage loft which was super cute unfortunately you couldn't sleep up there but it would still be a good place for storage and I thought it was still cool detail I also asked the broker to show me all of the finishes of the kitchen and he kind of like showed me in the pile of boxes I was sitting in the apartment the countertops and what the sink would look like and it looked like they were renovating it to be really modern so it would look really nice the only con of this apartment is that it wasn't the brightest the windows face Northwest so it would get some direct sunlight only in the afternoon but I definitely kept this one in mind as something to apply to as I went to the rest of my apartments for the day next up I headed back to Greenwich Village to look at a one-bedroom for $2,700 now this was a little bit out of my price range but I thought it was worth checking out because if it was a larger space I was like maybe willing to push my budget a little bit and I just liked looking at apartments I was like wow [ __ ] not right when I walked into this apartment the thing that struck me the most was how peaceful and quiet it was it was five flights of stairs up and face the back of the building so he really couldn't even hear Street noise it felt like a nearly peaceful Oasis away from New York I also loved the finishes on this apartment it had brick walls but they were painted white a while ago I had DIY my own wine hole out of a piece of styrofoam that's how much I love white brick walls it also had dark wood floors which hoo baby ooh baby that gives me going in a different way a lot of apartments in New York has the classic kind of orangey hardwood floor which is still very nice but it feels a little bit bright and brassy compared to my preferred aesthetic which is a little bit more like muted which oh these floors were so good overall this was such a beautiful apartment but my main concern was the kind of long and narrow layout it would make it harder to film outfit videos because in order to film a full body shot I need my camera a certain distance away from me and this apartment just didn't have a lot of width it was just a long void but it wasn't girthy yeah I was a little bit on the fence about this one I wasn't like so crazy head over heels for it that I needed to get it and then I needed to spend two thousand seven hundred dollars a month on it so I wanted to take like a couple more days to think about it but it turns out this apartment was super popular it so it got taken off the market by the end of the open house so I never got a chance to apply to it anyway so at this point it was coming to the end of the weekend and I was a little bit nervous because I had seen so many apartments and the ones that I liked even a little bit were already off the market so I basically at that point was considering that two thousand two hundred and ninety five dollar one in East Village that was still getting renovated maybe the one in Chinatown but I had one more apartment to see this one was a studio with a little bedroom alcove for two thousand dollars per month I showed up so early to this open house because at this point I have seen like what 13 apartments I have seen so many hard minutes all the ones I liked were going off the market so fast and I was reaching like the end of my rope I was ready to just commit to an apartment knew what I was looking for I knew what my options were and I was like I think this could be the one so I showed up like 15 minutes early to the open house and I made sure I was the first one in the door because this was such a good price it was the cheapest apartment I had seen in Manhattan not saying that 2,000 a month is cheap but for Manhattan it is very hard to come by right when I walked in I was like they seize it baby this is what I've been looking for her so sorry I'm like horrible at building suspense I'm just way too excited about this apartment it has windows that face south it has open views and right when I walked in there were so much direct sunlight streaming through the windows I was just like oh give me that dopamine baby give me that vitamin D I need it because it's winter and I'm so sad it has a little bit of that vintage charm it has an exposed brick wall but it has a pretty updated kitchen and it has a real oven which is also something that sometimes is a little bit rare in New York especially for cheaper cheaper apartments like this one in the back it has a cozy of a whole bedroom nook which I actually really like it's nice to have a little bit of separation between my sleeping space and my main working area there are definitely some cons of this apartment though namely that the ceilings are very very short like noticeably short while you walk in here and you're like bro I could I could literally touch the ceiling I think that they are like like eight feet tall ceilings and the other quirk of this apartment is that the bathroom is one of those funky ones where the toilet is in a separate room than the shower and this absurdly tiny sink so yeah the things you do to get slightly cheaper rent so in case it wasn't incredibly obvious this is the apartment that I ended up Tuesday it's all mine oh yeah so yeah I have lived here for about a month now and I love it like i 100% chose the right apartment for me kiss good job Ashley it's just a great place and I'm so excited that I can finally show you guys because I've been like hiding it in all of my Instagram stories and stuff anyways I hope this was really helpful for you guys if you are apartment hunting best of luck may the odds ever be in your favor and I will see you guys next week bye [Music]

Channel: bestdressed

Views: 6,198,464

Keywords: nyc apartment hunting, apartment hunting on a budget, new york apartment hunting, sweet digs, nyc apartment tour, nyc apartment hunting cheap, nyc apartment, living in nyc, how to find an apartment, apartment hunting vlog, apartment tour, empty apartment tour, apartment hunting tips, nyc apartment hunting manhattan, nyc apartment tour studio, living in manhattan, what $2000 will get you in nyc, nyc neighborhoods, cost to live in nyc, east village, greenwich village, brooklyn

Id: K0n-264CETA

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020