Dumped by the Landlord: be careful

By Yi Wu

I started my apartment hunt through surfing the website: craigslist.com. I made a list of all the apartments I am interested in, and called their landlords one by one.

This procedure works pretty well. However, sometimes the landlord showed us an apartment different from the one I found in the post. I figured out that in most cases the original apartment had been taken by someone else and the company/landlord tried to offer an alternative, usually an inferior one. Furthermore, releasing your phone number can make things worse, for you will get many unidentified calls. I once got a call from a girl claiming that I had contacted her for an apartment, but I never did!

Then, my future roommate, Her, invited me to see one of her finds. I had another appointment that day, so we rushed there and were only able to take a short look at it. The living room has much sunlight, which Her likes very much. Two days later, we went back again for more details. The landlord’s son-in-law, Sam, showed us around. He is a middle-aged American and never has much to say.

I will never forget the day when we decided to take this place, not because we liked the apartment so much, but because of the unusual things we experienced afterwards.

That night, when I happily arrived home, I got a call from Sam. He said he had had a fireman examine the kitchen of our apartment and it was considered unsafe, thus the landlord would not rent it to us. The kitchen is very important to us as Chinese enjoy cooking very much. He thereafter recommended another apartment to us. I was so surprised and hurt that I declined his alternative offer. I claimed that he had broken his promise, which is unfair and kind of illegal (Ann said I was brave to say so!). But Sam said he was not the landlord and we hadn’t reached any written agreement. I told him his act was too disappointing to accept for we had already turned down all other options. To my surprise, he started telling his success story from when he first arrived at New York with no money in pocket and no place to live in. After 10 minutes of educating me in how to be hard-working and independent, he said he would try to persuade the landlord to rent the apartment to us.

I felt he was not so bad as he appeared from the beginning, but I understood we definitely should consider other choices. We anxiously searched around Ridge Ave and Sherman Ave and called every phone number shown on the “for rent” signs. However, it was approaching mid-August at that moment and most apartments close to campus were already gone. One day, we were waiting in the front of an apartment building when coming across two ISI students, Wenchun and Richard. To our surprise, they came to see the same apartment. More surprisingly, the prices offered by the same agency were significantly different, $2,100 for us v.s. $1,200 for the boys. When the agent came, she told us the boys asked for a two-bedroom apartment, so the manager offered them a three-bedroom apartment at the two-bedroom apartment’s price. But she had no special deal for us any more. When we mentioned another previous apartment, Richard said he had also visited that one and the landlord offered him $1,150 per month, instead of the $1,245 we were offered. Discrimination! I felt we girls were treated unfairly. The apartment hunting story finally had a happy ending. Several days later, Sam told us the landlord would install a hood above the stove to insure cooking safety, and quite surprisingly approved our application. Anyway, this was our first chance to understand the American way. Learn to make deals, and learn to enjoy