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Here's a fun trick: every county should have a tax assessor site where you can look up the annual property taxes of your apartment building (or any other parcel). Then you can compare it to the rent you're paying.

the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

After I moved out from a place I was renting with my ex last year I crunched some numbers and realized that it’s cheaper to travel around the world and stay in a mix of hostels/long term stay airbnbs/share houses than it would be to rent a place by myself in a MCOL area while paying for a car. It’s absolutely fucking criminal how much price gouging there is in the US, I’m currently paying ~700 USD/mo for a cozy apartment in downtown Kyoto. It’s clean, quiet, safe, and I have literally everything I could ever need within a 20 minute walk. I don’t think anything comparable even exists in the US but the closest is likely downtown NYC/Boston for $3000+ a month while that same price might get you a place in bumfuck nowhere, North Dakota where a car is absolutely required.

So all of that is to say, OP, get the fuck out of the US if you can.

$9 fees to take your money? Jesus H.

its always good advice to take photos of a rental when you take possession, but God almighty, I would document every room and store all the photos on 4 flash drives, because you know those psychos are gonna chisel you on move out day for every dime of those deposits.

As someone who was recently apartment hunting & was going through the same kind of bullshit my heart goes out to you.

Also why was a 10 month lease like $300 a month cheaper than a longer lease? They're gonna bump the rent up at least that much after aren't they?

Hahaha this shit pissed me off during my search. It's always 10, 12, or 14 month leases too. At least - in my area - I assumed the 10 month leases were geared towards like, students since there is a university nearby but even that doesn't really make much sense because what college student is like "ah I don't really wanna sign a year lease, wish I could just do 10 months"??? Anyways one of the places I toured had one of those rent estimate/available units widgets on their site, which I'd spent a good 20 minutes fucking with to see what the cheapest possible rent for their 1br/1ba 500sqft apartments were - the cheapest iirc was like $1300/mo for 14 months.

So when the apartment manager led me back to her front office after giving me a tour and pulled out a printed out table showing the monthly rent for each floorplan based on a 10 month/12 month/14 month lease and the additional trash pickup & other reoccurring fees, I asked "I'm totally willing to sign a 24 month lease, can I get some sort of discount on the monthly rent?" and she literally laughed as if I were joking before going 'No we don't do that sort of thing here.'

Anyways I still occasionally get emails from them because she put my info into their system despite me literally getting up and walking out as soon as she said no. Death to all landlords (especially my current ones who are...were? idk i try not to think about it....my fucking friends and yet aren't exactly giving me a deal. 'But ABC we're not charging you market rate - you're literally just paying the monthly mortgage amount' they try to tell me, as if that doesn't mean I'm literally paying for them to own this apartment in perpetuity meanwhile they could theoretically evict me at any time....i will not spare them from the wall despite knowing them for over a decade and that's why I play the lottery like once a month)

Agh that's such bullshit. Hidden fees in all industries should be abolished, but especially in renting.

Just checking, you know that you're moving in, right? They're not trying to get you to pay an application fee and then ghost you? That was a pretty common scam last time I was house hunting.

Hope it works out well and they don't jack up the price on you. That happened to my aunt when she tried to move to California - she's been a nurse for like fifty years, lived here for one of them and then had to move back to the East Coast because they wanted to spike her rent (which is supposed to be illegal here but they had some kind of loophole).

I'm in the same boat brother. I don't know how anyone goes through this shit and doesn't become a maoist.

In Boston it's normal to have to pay full months rent for the first and last month, and the realtor fee. That's 3 full months rent, plus any application and credit report fees, per deposit, etc. So it's not unrealistic to pay $5-10k just to get into an old, shitty apartment that college students have been puking in for decades.

$1500 on deposit is criminal. Whoever enforces stuff like that would be looking at a wall in any just society.

Yep was similar for my current one. Needed double rent as deposit plus first month. Wiped out my savings which I only had cause I was an over the road trucker for 2 years with very few expenses (just food, entertainment, phone, etc)