I don’t like doing things last-minute, but apartments aren’t typically listed more than a month ahead of time. So I loaded all my possessions into my car, booked an AirBnb in Manhattan for a month, and made the long drive down from Michigan to start my housing search. To my surprise it only took about a week to find a lease and a roommate.

Summary

• Use StreetEasy to find apartments.

• Use Roomi to find roommates.

• Apartments go fast - find an apartment that’s good enough rather than searching for the best apartment.

• When finding a random roomate online, focus on filtering out terrible people as opposed to finding the best person.

• Measure room dimensions and use homestyler to see what will fit.

When housing is scare, satisfice don’t optimize

Most apartments are gone within a few days of being listed, so when you find a suitable apartment you have to act fast. Knowing what you’re looking for is key to making a quick decision.

Some might recommend using a decision matrix, but I think that’s overkill in this case. I found that a simple list of my minimum requirements was enough. Since there were so few options, I didn’t need to be able to rank apartments relative to each other - my goal was to find the first apartment which meets my minimum requirements.

Housing criteria

Requiremens:

• A bedroom which can fit a full size bed and my desk

• With a window

• Less than a 10 minute walk to work

• Rent of roughly $2,000 per month

Things I explicitly decided not to care about:

• In-unit washer and dryer (In NYC this is suprisingly expensive)

• Doorman building (out of my price range)

• Asthetically nice (my willingness to pay for this is low)

• Not having roommates

The search

Individual bedrooms are suprisingly hard to find in Manhattan. Unlike Hawaii, there are practiacally no individual bedrooms to rent on Craigslist. I checked a few other NYC specific room finding sites but didn’t find anything. I posted on few Facebook groups for NYC housing and was flooded with messages from scammers.

Instead, I opted to sign a new lease and find roommates. In NYC, StreetEasy is the only name in town for finding apartments. I visited a few and they all had the same process:

• Message the leasing agent on StreetEasy

• They reply by email with times they’re available and we set up a time for a showing - usually within the next day

• Meet the leasing agent at the apartment for the showing - it usually takes about 10 minutes.

Most listings don’t include a floor plan so I measured the bedrooms when I visited. Knowing the exact dimensions was key to figuring out whether I could fit my bed and desk. I used homestyler to make a 3D model to see what fit. It turns out interior design is really fun! I hope to make a blog post on that soon.

I visited a few apartments but due to my 10 minute commute constraint there were only two or three in the area. After I ruled out those there were zero.

When a new apartment came on the market that met my criteria, my roommate and I submitted an application a few hours after touring it.

Wait, what roommate?

In parallel with this housing search, I also conducted a roomate search. My approach to finding a roomate was similar to my housing search - satisfice, don’t optimize.

An excellent roommate can be life-changing, but a terrible roomate can make life suck. Given that I don’t have an existing social network in NYC to draw on, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that I’ll be best friends with a random roommate I find online. Instead, I focused on limiting downside risk - selecting for someone who is unlikely to be terrible.

My criteria:

• Has a full-time job, can make rent

• Not a huge partier - too likely to cause chaos at home

• Has similar preferences to me in terms of location / price / moving timeline

NYC has a few roommate finding sites. I had the best luck with Roomi. I signed up for a premium plan to signal high intent and messaged a few dozen people - introducing myself, sharing my location / price / timeline, and asking if they’re interested in setting up a call.

To make the intro calls easier I wrote a script:

• Introduce myself

• Go over the same details from my intro message

• Confirm that our location / price / timeline are compatible

• Confirm that they have a full-time job

• If it was a job or company I’m not familiar with, I asked their income

• I’m looking for a quiet + relazed environment, ask how much of a partier they are

• Explain that I’m social and talkative, but am OK if my roommates prefer to keep to themselves. Clarify that friendship is a plus but not an expectation - the most important thing is keeping a good working relationship as roommates.

• Ask them to tell me about themself and what they’re looking for in a roommate

I have a friend with a much more involved roomate interview process which includes a multiple choice test and a set of behavioral questions. Compared to that, is my 10 minute phone call sufficient to screen out bad roommates? I hope so! I used a similar approach in Hawaii and things worked out well.