

Ask HN: How to apartment search in the bay? - blairanderson

I&#x27;m researching a move towards the bay area and curious what sources that people were successful with... (craigslist&#x2F;padmapper)???<p>I&#x27;m a developer, is there an apartment search for hackers?
======
nostrademons
Craigslist. It's still the best source if you're doing your apartment search
remotely.

If you're local, another good approach is just to drive down the multi-family
zoned areas in the valley (it's pretty obvious where they are if you live
here, plus you can see them on satellite view in Google Maps), pop into the
office, and ask if they have any vacancies coming up. Most blocks are pretty
densely packed, so you can easily hit up half a dozen complexes in an hour and
get a sense of what rents are like, how clean the complex is, how friendly the
management is, what sort of people live there, etc. In my most recent
apartment hunt I took a bike trip with my girlfriend - we just biked down a
bunch of the residential neighborhoods in Sunnyvale and stopped at every
apartment complex.

Another useful strategy is to take a short-term lease when you first move out,
then once you're acclimatized, pick out the places you really want to live and
ask if there're vacancies. You learn a lot of tacit knowledge about the area
that way, eg. the California/Escuela area of Mountain View has a number of
openings on Craigslist, but it also has a reputation of being kinda a bad
neighborhood in MTV (nothing that'll put your personal safety at risk, but I
know a couple people that were robbed while living there), and you'll only
pick that up from living in the area and talking with locals there.

------
coralreef
Obligatory padmapper.com mention.

[http://www.padmapper.com](http://www.padmapper.com)

