The Philadelphia Story: A Day of Apartment Hunting

On Wednesday, my future roommate Kim and I set out to begin the research for our planned November exodus to the City of Brotherly Love. I finish my nursing program on October 31st so our goal is to move to Philly sometime around then. While we have been planning this for many months, no real actual progress has been made on the plans so on Wednesday, the second hottest day of the summer or some such thing, the research kicked off in high gear.

We spent most of Tuesday night researching apartments on Craigslist. But not directly on Craigslist. No no. We had done just enough research to discover the fabulous hybrid of HousingMaps. With HousingMaps, you get a blend of Craigslist and GoogleMaps with fabulous searching features. Simply pick your city and price range and off you go, or click on show filters for some more great tools like number of rooms. After investigating, we had a list of 20 or so apartments that interested us. Next came phase two, or the part where we plotted them on GoogleMaps using the MyMaps feature and e-mailed listings that only had e-mail addresses for information on how we could see the apartments. After about four hours of research we went to bed, only to wake up the next morning and call all the people on the list to make appointments. To make a long story short, we ended up with 6 appointment to see 7 apartments.

We saw everything from tiny, dirty apartments to spacious townhouses with basements and yards. We looked everywhere from center city to scary ghetto South Philly. The results were kind of strange. The price range? $1450-1695. It didn't seem to matter where the apartment was or what sort of features it was offering. That's just the standard price for a two bedroom. In fact, the pricest apartment was the one in scary ghetto South Philly. One apartment we looked at had a bedroom so small you could barely close the door with a twin bed in it. For only $50 dollars more you got an apartment 5 blocks away with better location, skylights, a parking spot in the private attached garage, and a roof deck. No, I don't get it either. For a $100 more you could get a spacious 4th floor walk-up with more closets then I have ever seen in an apartment in Society Hill in a historic 18th century brownstone with what looked like the original floors. Oh just thinking about the amount of charm hurts me a little bit inside. Needless to say, I was distraught that we could not immediately make a deposit on it. In fact I moaned about this very fact for something like 45 minutes. Everytime I would whine, Kim would start to list all of its wonderful features dreamily. It was not a good cycle.

So after sweating it out on the streets, we realized that our prospects look good, if not a little more expensive then I was hoping for. But I guess it's worth it to live in right in the heart of such a great city. Now that we have some info, we're suspending the hunt until such a time when we can actually take the next apartment we fall in love with. Which is probably wise because I don't think I could stand to loose another 18th century fourth floor walkup with central air, no matter how bad the parking is.