craigslist!

Ugh, I found my first apartment in the tiny local newspaper. Such a mistake. I had just moved 1500 miles away from home and everyone I knew to take up my first "real" job. I had to kip in a crummy motel for a week; apparently I'd picked absolutely the worst time of year to find an apartment in this somewhat seasonal tourist town.

I was increasingly desperate, so I snatched up a crummy studio because the rent was super cheap. Sadly, the rent was super cheap because the landlord was secretly cray-cray and something of a slumlord. Initially I'd steered clear of Craigslist because it freaked me out for various reasons, but for my second apartment I trolled Craigslist for about a solid three months before I found something decent and decently priced.

For my area, a combination of Craigslist and a local apartment listing website (found by googling variations of "[city] apartment listings" and sifting past all of the realtors, all of whom only seem to deal in absurdly overpriced apartments) is the best way to find an apartment. More and more landlords seem to be realising the importance of photos in their listings too, which is excellent. I started automatically ruling out listings without photos after viewing a few and realising that there was a distinct reason they hadn't posted any photos...

I got lost. I was wandering around and ran into a woman outside raking leaves when I asked for directions. We got into a conversation about how I was apartment hunting and it turned out that she was the landlord to the lovely building we were standing in front of! I signed a lease three weeks later and have been living there for the past five years! :)

When I first moved to NYC, 14 years ago, I was broke and needed a cheap, no fee place for myself and my roommate. I was subletting in the E. Village for the summer while looking in Brooklyn. I responded to an ad for a place in Clinton Hill, and got turned around. A friendly woman asked if I was lost and when I told her where I was going, she walked me to the building, which was on her block. On the way there, we started talking and learned we were both from Virginia and knew some of the same people. Then she said "I'm looking to get out of my lease. Come see my apartment, and if you like it, I'll tell the landlord you're my friend from home, and you can take it over." That's how I wound up w/ a tiny but affordable, no fee, 2 bdrm garret apartment in a gorgeous brownstone on one of the prettiest blocks in Clinton Hill. When my roommate and I left 2 years later, we passed it on to friends. Those friends did the same. 3 "generations" of friends of friends lived there for over 6 years. We couldn't have been luckier.

I had rented apartments in other countries but found my first long-term US one via apartments.com

Not all the complexes in the area are there, but many are, and you can search by the ameneties you actually care about (I don't care if they have a pool but a washer/dryer in my unit, YES PLEASE!). Also, there are tenet reviews which is always VERY helpful!

These two are great!

http://streeteasy.com/

http://www.nakedapartments.com/

I was moving from VA to NY/NJ and had to get an apartment quick. I ended up looking in Jersey City because it was in between my school and NYC where my husband was working. My husband and I researched the best area for low crime, high square footage and reasonable prices. Then we hit caldwell banker, got a realtor and prayed to find the perfect place w/ the broker's fee paid. We did. It didn't cost us any more money to be driven around all day by a broker and we did it all in 1 day. We came up two weeks later and moved in.

Gosh, it's so much easier now than it used to be with Craiglist, GoogleMaps and Streetview, online reviews, etc.
Back in the day, it was picking up the local alternative weekly, calling for addresses and lots and lots of driving around (with a paper map) to check things out. Moving to a new city meant having no idea what neighborhoods were good or bad and just hoping you got lucky.
The best way to to have a friend or coworker who is moving or knows someone who is moving that can vouch for the landlord and the apartment.

Funnily enough, after a year and a half, the husband and I are on the brink of leaving our first apartment, so this is rather a poignant time to tell this story. So. We were married in May 2009, and a year later, after all the immigration got sorted out, I was going to be moving to Vegas with my husband, he was moving from Florida, I was moving from Canada and he would be arriving a few months before me. He was crazy busy with packing and work, and I love this kind of thing, so I said I'd look into apartments online. My family moved around a lot when I was little, so I learned to love looking at houses. I love moving. I love that feeling of being in a brand new, empty house, and it being all strange and unfamiliar, and that first night in a new house with its different noises and its queer creakings and settlings. This was the first time my input into where I was going to be living would be central, and not just adjunct to my parents' final decision, so I went a little nuts.

I researched extensively for about two months. Craigslist, Hotpads, Google real estate, etc. Documented costs/benefits, pros/cons, researched neighbourhoods (nitty gritty data about rates of crime, average rental price, that kind of thing). Looked at renting houses versus apartments, looked for places with pet policies to keep our options open if we wanted to get a cat or dog (or, as I was thinking at the time, rats). Vegas is a strange city, and after being here for a year and a half, honestly not a place that I ever want to live again. But I was so excited at the time, that I'd convinced myself it was paradise, and I made little keening noises every time I looked at a particularly nice place.

So. I got the husband's input every stage of the way, of course, but in typical (male) fashion, he was fairly unconcerned with the same details I was. Finally the time for his move rolled about, and as he set out from Florida I started putting together my final list of likely places. While I AGONIZED about negative reviews of the management of different complexes and different parking configurations, he was blithely driving across the country, calling me when he stopped in assorted cities so I could direct him to hotels with free wi-fi.

Finally he got to Vegas. And I presented him with a map. An incredible map, a map detailed with the routes from his chosen hotel to assorted apartments and rental homes, a custom google map RICH in data, replete with information, just oozing with all the things he'd need to make an evaluation of each particular location, their pros, their cons, their calculated distance from his workplace, all that good stuff I'd worked at for the past two months.

And he chose the first place he visited, without even looking at the other dozen. The end.

(Epilogue: And now he bitches about the parking and the fact that the management are pricks. I, on the other hand, think it's fine.)

I was super desperate and snatched up the first studio I saw. Which was great. Cute and affordable at only $325 a month. It was in the back of a fourplex in Sacramento and by a year I had moved into one of the one bedroom apartments in the fourplex. It was destined. :) I also found the studio in the local paper.

Wow, talking about going down on the memory lane...

this was when i still young and stupid, and couldn't get along with my mom living at home. A college friend who was already renting this "cottage" house behind a big property thought that she could use the extra cash from me to share the house. It was a split level house, so she and I each occupied a floor. I have to say, not too shaby for first apartment. My portion of the rent was only $250, and this was from back in '96-'97 time era... good times!

I was moving to NYC and my job covered relocation expenses which included a place to stay while I looked for a place (about a month-I ended up staying w a friend and paid her) and for the Broker costs.
It all worked out. I moved to Crown Heights BK on the verge of it become Prospects Heights.

Ive moved around NYC since then, and found some good places...luckily no roaches, rats, mice, bedbugs
in any spots. Blessed.

I found my first apt in in the New York Times -- the landlady asked that I bring the first month's rent ($160) and one month's deposit in cash. Needless to say, it was a very long time ago, and the city was very different then.

I found my first apartment mostly through sheer dumb luck. I was moving from Massachusetts to DC to start grad school, and had taken a couple of weekend trips down to look at places I'd found on Craig's List, but wasn't having much luck. I'd pretty much settled on a place that would have just been for the summer, instead of a full year, when I got a call from an apartment building I'd looked at, but which hadn't had any vacancies. They suddenly had a studio available, and did I want it? I could afford the unit, and it was within block of campus, so I took it, sight unseen.

It turns out later, the reason why apartments had suddenly opened up in that building? There had been an electrical fire, and then the city had discovered that the wiring in the building was ancient and not up to code, so they'd condemned the building until it was totally rewired. So all of the building's residents had been kicked out of their apartments for almost 3 weeks, and the company was letting people out of their leases if they wanted. This was kind of freaky to find out after I'd moved in (but at least I knew that the building had just been rewired!)

The apartment itself was crummy, but livable. I was definitely ready to get out by the time my lease was up, though, because the proximity to campus meant that the building was full of undergrads who regularly screamed at each other in the hallways at 3 in the morning and left trash all over the floor of the trash room. Ugh.

Moral of the story--actually look at an apartment before you agree to rent it! :-)

Craigslist. I found my first apartment on it - it was actually the very first place my roommate and I looked at, and we jumped on it. It wasn't perfect, but it was perfectly fine for the time. I recommend craigslist and the village voice, I found my current place by constantly hitting refresh on craigslist and calling about stuff just as it was posted. I was the first person to call about my current apartment, visited that same day, signed the lease the next day, and it is seriously dreamy!

I had a realtor! It sounds insane, but my boyfriend got a job far away the summer we graduated from college, and they told him about a local realtor who did both actual real estate and rentals. It's free for the renter; they get their money from landlords somehow. We found a pretty ideal first apartment that way. It was especially good because we were hours and hours away and really only had one day to choose a place.

I was in college & wanted to move out of a nightmarish shared house. So I knocked on doors in the Southhampton area near Rice University asking if anyone knew of a garage apartment for rent. Eventually found a cute studio apartment behind a mansion. The area below the stairs to this place was wild & untended & was home to a family of raccoons. If I left the door open at night the raccoons would trundle into the house to have a snack at the cat food bowl! I would have to push them out of the house with a broom....

Yellow pages in the phone book. I was moving to college and looked up rental companies. Such a mistake, looking back, because I ended up with a cookie-cutter college apartment with absolutely no personality. Now I ask around...

I had been searching craigslist for a month but didn't find anything good. One realtor had a huge chunk of the market but were terrible to work with. I didn't want to work with someone who couldn't get me what I needed or weren't enthusiastic about their properties. I ended up trolling the city one day and frustrated that I wasn't finding anything, I picked up the local paper as a last-ditch effort. I found another real estate agency in the classifieds, they showed me two great places the very next day, and a week later I had a signed lease agreement in my inbox!

Craigslist.

I looked at over 35 apartments in 2 weeks in Manhattan.

Craigslist is how I found my first apartment, but most recently I found my place by driving around and calling signs in the yard. Apartment hunting is so much easier with a smartphone! I took pictures of the places, had a record of every place called & when, and if it was found online or not.

Bite the bullet and pay a fee. The agents can give you exactly what you want for the price you want and it won't take hours and hours of stress. You have to put a dollar amount on what your time is worth. You'll pay that cost on your own wear and tear or on a professional who will show you three places and you'll be done in an afternoon. I actually hated doing it but it worked. Rent controlled one bedroom in Carrol Gardens two blocks from the subway.

My parents helped me. I found a bunch of places online through a couple of reputable sites (I avoided Craigslist since I have seen a ton of scams on there) and my parents and I went out to pick one on a big road trip (it was in another city). I loved their help, but I didn't really have a choice anyways since I was 17 and wasn't allowed to sign a lease on my own at any decent places.

It was a great place in some ways (large, sunny, great 'hood). However, the elevator often wouldn't fully reach the floor (The floor would be at your knees and you would have to step up onto it) and the walls were paper thing. You could hear conversations of the neighbors. Not arguments. Conversations lol. There was also no individual thermostats! That was pretty crazy.

Craigslist and Streeteasy. In 2004 I found a rent controlled studio in East Midtown through a broker from craigslist. I paid a fee. The place was a dump but I was just happy to live in Manhattan for under $1,000 a month. 5 years later I wanted to live in a 'real' apartment. So I found my current 1-bedroom from streeteasy. I think Streeteasy is a great tool - you can narrow down your search by all your criteria as well as budget and you can get a lot of info about the places. Many of them are no-fee. Mine was no fee too and I love my place.

Craigslist—both NYC apartments I found there were fee-free and as-described. If you do your homework and are vigilant (if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!), it's an excellent resource.

I love StreetEasy, too.

I'm not going to count my 2 apartments as my "first" apartment, they were too dorm feeling. Our first "real" apartment with my husband and I together was found by searching the web for local management companies. We found a nice 2 bedroom apartment, paid heat, and in a small town about 20 minute drive from work. Its got its disadvantages, but its cheap, bigger than the city apartments, paid heat (hello!) and in small town where we can walk everywhere.

@ Moxie the Maven "I found my current place by constantly hitting refresh on craigslist and calling about stuff just as it was posted."

That's what I had to do to find my new apartment too! I called literally precisely 5 minutes after the listing went live and I was the second person. I was the first person to view it though, and there were five more people lined up that afternoon after me. Thank god for first come, first served. Competition for good apartments is fierce.

http://www.padmapper.com/
for online listings
and
http://www.mapnificent.net/
for neighborhoods and public transportation in the area

my first place was a hot mess of a closet... still can't believe I lasted in a less than 300 sq. ft. studio with a roommate and her dog for 2 years! (with mice and roaches too! ick!)

Research as much as possible and make a list of questions (average utilities summer-winter, security, maintenance, etc...) before seeing the place. If you can meet the previous tenant ask them for honest pros/cons.

Also walk the neighbor hood day and night to see how you feel about the vibe... an area can be drastically different at different times of the day.

I found my first aparment on Craigslist. I couldn't be happier. It's huge, and everything I wanted in an apartment without a huge price tag. It was alot of work constantly searching online every minute of everyday, but it was so worth it at the end of the day.

I had told this story on apartment therapy before but, I love reliving it. I found the ad in The Chicago Reader newspaper. The ad said that the apartment was in a brownstone, in the Gold Coast which is walking distance to the beach and Second City Theatre. And that the apartment had a working fireplace, a seperate dining room, a walk up bedded loft area, hardwood floors thoughout and a little fire escape/almost patio. The apartment was dirt cheap because of the square footage and it was sold as a studio even though it had 5 different private areas.

The minute I walked in to the crowded open house I fell in love with it. It was ooozing of charm, even better than I could ever imagine.

I then proceded to "pick" on the apartment and cited LOUDLY that it didn't have a real bathtub (just a shower) and that the kitchen was so small and there were hardly any closets...WHILE I wrote the check. ;) People started to leave but there was at least one other prospective tenant who was shocked when I handed the deposit over as fast as I could without even taking a breath.

I lived there for many years until my husband (then my boyfriend) moved in and the place was just too small for our needs.

You never forget your first....place.

The first apartment I found that I really wanted (but didn't get) I don't remember how I came across but I do remember every detail of it to this day: the second story of an old craftsman house with a door at ground level opening to stairs leading up to the apartment. It had amazing built in's in every room including window seats. A small "doghouse" type space built around a dormer window (which would have been perfect for a twin mattress on the floor as a bedroom or just a cozy reading place, a nice balcony overlooking the backyard, lot's of big windows and even though the kitchen was tiny and installed in the "hall" space at the top of the stairs it was charming -a small two burner antique stove and oven to one side, refrigerator and sink to the other. The only thing I can't remember is the bathroom. The landlord didn't like that I was so young and wanted a letter that my parents would cover me if I wasn't able to make the rent ever. If I'd gotten that place I don't think I would ever have moved again.
The first apartment I DID move into was the upper floor of an old barn which I found when a girl at a cafe I would take my lunch break at said she needed a new roommate. We later moved into one of the front house apartments -a large Victorian house divided up haphazardly. Our bedrooms had double pocket doors, our kitchen was a sloppy addition on the front porch. It was a crazy place but fun to live there.
But my favorite story of a place I did get was the one I live in now. I'd called on an ad in the paper and the landlord would never call me back. I came to find that he was also the landlord of a woman I worked with AND that he had rented the listed apartment to another woman I worked with who told me that there was another (much better, actually) vacancy in the same small building. Both co-workers called the landlord to recommend me and I ended up getting a better place than the one I'd initially been calling for!

Before the internet offered dozens of websites, in Manhattan there was the NY Times Sunday edition. I tipped a corner newstand guy to get the classifieds early (he had to cut a bundle open). After three weekends in a row, I landed a little studio on E. 47th. Not great but my first NY apt.

I lucked out. I was working in Florida with very limited time to visit New York to find an apartment. My mom ran into one of her friends in the grocery store and her friend had kept in touch with her son's old roommate... who knew of an opening in his building for an EXTREMELY good deal. I flew up the next weekend to check it out and I signed the lease that day. It was the first place I even looked at in the city and I'm constantly amazed at how great my location is and how low my rent is. Now if I could use some of the luck in my career! :)

Is every poster named "August 1st" or is this some kind of snafu with the date in place of the poster's name? Funny, but also odd. Thought you might want to know.

Well in the good old days, there was only three ways (1) newspaper ad (2) flyer and (3) word of mouth.

Mine was found in the paper, shared a two bedroom with three girls while in school. We made a makeshift walk in behind a beam in the living room with rolling racks since we couldn't fit all our clothes in the bedroom closets.

User Klausonline here, seeing as there's some sort of glitch going on.
My first apartment (which I'm living in still) I found on Padmapper. I had to go through a number of hoops and get the parents to cosign, but it was the best deal in the neighborhood, and it's a block from work.
Downsides? Only 272 square feet and the management has been slow to fix things. So it goes.

My co-worker told me one they that there was an apartment ready for rent in her building. We went there at night and with a torch, we checked the place. Next day, I and my so rented it.

Most of these comments are making me feel old. When I was looking for my first apartment there was no Craigslist. The internet had only just barely been invented and you had to pay by the minute. The founders of Google were probably in high school. I looked for my first place the old-fashioned way, with the Sunday classifieds, a Thomas-Brothers mapbook and a wing and a prayer.

It turned out to be decent enough for what I was paying but when I moved to my second place I'd had some friends who lived in this beautiful old building in a fantastic part of town and I just knew that's where I wanted to be. I visited the landlord and they happened to have a vacancy in the best corner of the building. It was a perfect apartment for about 4 years.

Now I use padmapper.com which is something like the lovechild of Craigslist and Google. I was able to research the neighborhood, find out crime statistics, walk-ability ratings and see other tenant reviews through apartments.com and yelp.com.

My husband was starting his PhD in the medical center, so we started with where I was familiar: across the street from my old high school. First complex we looked at is where we live now. What got us to look was that it was older (had trees) and there were more people in scrubs than the local college tees. That was really important to us, since we are just a few miles away for UTSA and many of the other complexes had kids puking outside their doors the Saturday morning we came to look. Because it's older, we pay less per square foot and our faucets are loud. But after 4 years, they have updated a lot of the look of the complex. So glad we went with our guts.

I had just graduated college and gotten my first "real" job so I was really scared of bills and thought I would low-ball it for my first apartment, which I found on Craigslist. It was a 350sqft studio in converted hotel/motel built in the 1970s. The hallways smelled like death because there wasn't any ventilation. There were only 2 washers and 2 dryers for the entire building so doing laundry was harder than getting into Yale. Near the end of my stay, I swear the studio became infested with spiders. I only stayed there for 6 months before moving into a 1 bedroom apartment in the same building. The space issues were gone but everything else remained. When they converted the hotel into apartments, I think they combined two rooms into a 1 bedroom meaning I had a bathroom and kitchen that WAS a bathroom... My cable hookup didn't work and I had a black mold problem in the bathroom which was so small I couldn't open the shower door all the way!

I desperately wanted out of the dorms and my parents house (on weekends), so I scoured the...PHONE BOOK for apartment rentals - yes, the phone book. And I'm only 26 now.

I found mine on Kijiji. I've been here almost a year now and I love it. I'm in a 1+1 bedroom condominium and decided to sacrifice location for more space. I'm a little outside of my desired area, but I have a huge (for a rental, anyway) kitchen and a little den.

It was a disaster after the last tenant left and my landlord had a ton of work to do before I moved in, so he gave me a cut on the rent because I was willing to rent it without seeing the finished product. It's stunning now and completely feels like home.

I'm still living in my first apartment. :)

Technically, I've lived in three other places (during college). I've been in my first, grown-up, on-my-own apartment now for a year, and I love it.

I knew which neighborhood I wanted to live it, which greatly aided my search process. I found my apartment through a Craigslist post--which lead me to the landlord's website--which lead me to looking at about five of their units in the area. I probably looked at 15 apartments in total, but once I saw mine, I knew it was the one I wanted--one bedroom, new windows, hardwood floors.

I love it. :)

I found my first apartment on the Miami Herald Classified section...I didn't tell my parents I was moving out until I signed the lease, they were so sad that I was moving out. Ummm, did I mentioned I was 24? Yes, I was 24 graduated out of Graduate Nursing School yet, they wanted me to still live at home. It was a beautiful Lake house in Miami Shores near Biscayne Boulevard, $1050 per month...gorgeous little place, which I've only stayed in for about 10 months because I had found a better job in Chicago with the University of Chicago Medical Center. When I arrived in Chicago, I stayed with a friend for 3 months while paying her $400 per month. Later, I'd find my teeny tiny studio apartment in Gold Coast on apartment.com for $1325, I was basically paying for location not for space. It was very accessible and easy to get around BUT the space was tiny...I had to rent an extra space to store my shoes and some boxes. I've decided to move after my lease was over and found a place on craiglist...it was cute but not as accessible as my Gold Coast apartment. As of today, I am still looking for a better, cheaper Chicago apartment, I've yet to find any. I'm still looking for that gorgeous Lake House in Chicago ;-)

I found mine through this site. As a newly single mom, without a lot of time or know how for apartment searching it was a huge lifesaver! I was able to view 3D floor plans, walk-score maps, compare my favorites, and easily search for my must-have amenities, i.e. POOL!! :)