Renting in Cobble Hill?
Folks, we’ve recently started looking for a rental in Cobble Hill, and so far have been very discouraged — “no fee” apartments are rare and usually crappy. What incentives do landlords have to rent direct? The renter pays the “finders’ fee”, the landlord does not have to do anything – is it generally useless trying…
Folks,
we’ve recently started looking for a rental in Cobble Hill, and so far have been very discouraged — “no fee” apartments are rare and usually crappy.
What incentives do landlords have to rent direct? The renter pays the “finders’ fee”, the landlord does not have to do anything – is it generally useless trying to find a place (one you can actually raise a family in, not share with someone else looking for a bargain in a nice neighborhood) without paying a broker?
I was able to find 2-3 “by owner” apartments vs about 50 offered by various brokers — is there a better place to look? With $3,000/mo rents, paying a 12%-15% fee to a broker makes moving a very expensive proposition 🙁
Any ideas (besides craigslist) are welcome…
The great thing about being a broker is that you can lead a long life of doing hard drugs, completely destroying any semblance of a brain, and then you can become a broker and charge renters ungodly sums for “finding” listings and talking up crappy shithole apartments with absurd rents. Everyone wins!
If you don’t want to pay a fee stay where you are. You will eventually find something.
If you’re a parent or a soon-to-be parent, you can join the parents’ yahoo group — bococaparents — and sometimes you’ll see direct rental listings. If you have an NYU connection, the school has an online rental board you can check (at least they used to . . . ). And there’s always the Village Voice (unless that’s changed, too — I haven’t looked for a new rental in a couple of years), which is definitely not as useful a source these days, but it is where we found our first FRBO rental in Brooklyn Heights in 2003. It can be good because I think there are owners — often older ones — who’ve been around for a while and often have beautiful, old-school places to rent, and are just more familiar with the Voice than with Craigslist. Other than that, it’s Craiglist and going to the bigger rental buildings in the ‘hood (I assume they exist in Cobble Hill; they do in the Heights) and putting your name on lists with supers or managing agents (I never had any luck with that, but it seemed worth trying).
Good luck!
I also much prefer Park Slope over either Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens, myself.
Cobble Hill is absurdly priced for what it is.
No Park?
No thanks.
why move to park slope when cobble hill?carroll gardens is o much nicer?
What about putting in regular ads yourself, saying you are seeking a FRBO unit, describing yourself as an ideal tenant for a family-size apartment. Post flyers in the neighborhood, too. I’ve seen those many times in Park Slope. It could be ideal for reaching new homeowners who are renovating a rental unit in a house they bought, who have not yet hired a broker to find tenants. If you really wanted to be creative, you could put a flyer in the door of recently sold 2-family houses in the area you are targeting.
it can take a month of looking every day at craigslist to find the right FRBO (for rent by owner) but it is worth it. It only takes 10 minutes a day: 5 minutes in the morning and 5 in the evening. Less if you use an RSS reader anyway and are online a lot. Maybe every 5 days you’ll find a listing that looks good, and 1 in 5 of them will work out. Of course some months/seasons are worse than others but that is true for broker listings anyway.
cobble hill is way overpriced compared to Fort Greene and Park Slope
Maybe you should move to Ohio.