The apartment hunt, round 2.

About a week or so ago, Sarah and I stopped denying the fact that our apartment was being sold and decided to look for new places to live. This was a fairly quick and easy process that later got complicated.

We started out with a broker who sucked. Before our inaugural apartment-hunting excursion, he let us know that we'd be doing a lot of walking and that having my dad drive us around would probably be helpful.* So, my dad drove into Brooklyn and brought us to the decided meeting place ... only for the broker arrive an hour late, in his own car. So my dad drove back to Manhattan, and we drove to three apartments that sucked. We didn't call him again.

Then we met a broker who was nice and not stupid. He showed us a really nice apartment very close to where we live now (a few blocks from the Beverly Road stop on the Q), and we decided to apply for it. Then he told us that there was already an application in on the apartment, but we decided to apply anyway in case that application fell through. Then that application fell through. So we got first dibs.

By this Friday afternoon, all of our paperwork was in and we were good to go. Then a broker showed up at our apartment to show it to a potential buyer ... which meant that the apartment hadn't been sold yet (even though, when I called the landlord last week to ask whether the apartment had actually sold, I'm pretty confident that he said yes and not no). We called him again, and he admitted that the apartment wasn't selling, and that he'd be willing to let us stay for a little while longer.

Meanwhile, we were approved for the other apartment. And giving it up means losing the $500 deposit that took it off the market and the $100 we paid in application fees.

So, we need to talk to our landlord. If he can let us stay for close to a year, then it seems worth it to stay (and maybe he will be nice and pay us back for the apparently unnecessary money we spent looking for a new apartment while he lied to us and told us that our apartment had been sold). If he wants us to stay on a month-by-month basis, at the whim of the real estate market, then that doesn't really work for us. If we can negotiate our lease on the new place and have it start on September 1st instead of August 1st, and then stay at our current place for just one more month ... then maybe that would work. There are a lot of factors and people and monetary exchanges involved.

And then we have to ask our broker to either lower his fee or allow us to pay it off later ... since neither of us actually has the necessary amount of money in our bank accounts.

This was almost totally painless!


* Sarah has a stress fracture in her foot. We're not that lazy.