What happens when you decide March of your senior year of college that you’re going to move 2,000 miles away in May? A lot of Google searching.
The Hunt Begins
My roommate Anna started her new job in Denver on May 15th. That gave us about two months to establish a budget, find apartments we liked, tour them, sign a lease, and get moved in, all while finishing up classes and saying our goodbyes to our friends and family – no pressure.
We started our apartment search the way all 20-somethings search for anything: on Google. Phrases like “apartments in Denver”, “cheap two bedrooms apartments in Denver”, “pet-friendly apartment complexes”, “best neighborhoods in Denver for 20-somethings” filled up our search history. The list got more bizarre and desperate the longer we looked.
Charkie found some unique places to nap during the 10 hour drive from Oklahoma to Colorado
Ultimately our searches kept leading us back to Apartments.com. From there we were able to easily search for the amenities and areas that fit our budget. We used Apartments.com to quickly eliminate buildings that didn’t fit our needs, and went to potential properties’ websites to investigate further.
Our Process to Find a New Home
We each dumped our favorite properties into a spreadsheet, with each property’s website, price (including parking, pet, utilities, and application fees), location, length of contract, square footage, Apartments.com ratings, as well as the property’s amenities.
Together we had about 10 apartments we liked. From there we narrowed the list down to just our top five. Anna came out to tour during her spring break in mid March, scheduling a tour with each of our top five.
A Few Tips We Found Helpful
While touring, Anna recorded videos to send to me so we could both see the apartments. This was super helpful to refer back to, and I would highly recommend to anyone checking out more than one property at a time to do the same.
When lunch time rolled around, Anna started scrolling through Google Maps to see what was nearby for lunch and stumbled across an apartment complex that wasn’t on our list. After checking out their website and sending it to me, we decided it wouldn’t hurt to see one more (especially because we weren’t in love with any of the ones we had seen).
After a wild apartment search – the gang’s finally all here for a family photo!
Final Thoughts
We both loved the apartment; it was in budget, had all the amenities we wanted, and was in the perfect location (barely 20 minutes away from Digible)! After weeks of Googling, checking websites, reviews, and ILSs who would’ve thought we would have stumbled across our new home on Google Maps!
