I moved from Boston to the Bay Area a few months ago. Priya (my girlfriend) and I heard all sorts of horror stories about the rental market. The fact that searching for “How to find an apartment in San Francisco” on Google yields dozens of pages of advice is a good indicator that apartment hunting is a painful process.
Boston is cold, but finding an apartment in SF is scary
We read that landlords hold open houses, and that you have to bring all of your paperwork to the open house and be willing to put down a deposit immediately to even be considered. We started exhaustively researching the process, and figured out that a lot of finding an apartment comes down to timing. Some landlords want to hold an open house no matter what, but for others, being one of the first people to see the apartment usually means that you can get it. You eneed to find the listing, quickly figure out if it meets your criteria, then call the landlord to arrange a showing to have a shot.
We looked around…