For the past few weeks, my husband and I have been apartment searching.  That’s right, we’re renters!  Not sure if readers find that surprising.  But when I talk to coworkers, who are of similar economic class, they’re usually shocked to hear that we’re not homeowners.

So why rent, when we’re wealthy enough to afford a house?  One major reason: we hate cars.  We use public transit.  (This is also a shock to coworkers.)

So if you take transit time, and multiply it by our hourly wage, getting anywhere is very expensive.  We can afford it, it’s just time.  But it’s easily worth thousands of dollars per month to live in precisely the right location.  We want a place next to a grocery store, a train stop, and our workplace.  The typical suburban hellscape of single-family residences doesn’t work for us.  When you consider the economics of it, what we want is a good apartment complex.  In other words, we want what they call a “luxury” apartment.

What do these apartment buildings look like?  Generally they’re about 5 stories tall, arranged around a central courtyard.  They usually have fancy amenities like a swimming pool, sauna, gym, package room, coworking space, game rooms, party spaces, pet spas, and so on.  They have especially lavish leasing offices, although often poorly staffed.

Most of these amenities are, as far as I’m concerned, pretty useless.  A bunch of dead weight.  For example, having a gym is nice but you can just get a gym membership and it would be cheaper.  I think the amenities are there mostly to look good when you tour the place.  The “luxuries” that actually we want are: Location.  Space.  Air conditioning.

So when we were considering apartments, I did some detailed calculations.  I estimated the amount of time spent on commuting, weekly grocery trips, occasional social engagements.  I added in the price of rent.  And I made up a function that calculates utils from square footage.  Amenities were noted but did not figure in.  By switching apartments, we’re making a profit of 800 utils per month!

While it wasn’t really an important factor in our decision, there were many cases where it seemed like building managers/owners/representatives were pretty scummy.  Like, I don’t live there so I don’t really know.  But I got the sense.  A few anecdotes:

• One apartment offered the “amenity” of a valet trash system.  This is negative value.  It was mandatory and they charged money for it.  Judging by resident reviews, the service just means people leave trash in the corridor where valets inconsistently pick it up.
• One tour guide, rather than telling us the monthly rent, instead emphasized how much money we would save on rent.  He was advertising “concessions”, wherein we would get the first six weeks of rent free.  Concessions are basically reduced rent… in the first year.  Followed by a promise to increase rent in the second year.  Listen, guy, we’re not fooled for a moment, just tell us the rent.
• One tour guide ghosted us.  My husband scheduled the tour by corresponding with an AI agent–the only method of contact available.  The AI claimed to schedule a tour, and then later claimed it had done no such thing.  Then it said it would get us in touch with a leasing agent, followed by crickets.  Instead of touring the apartment we sat in a cafe laughing at negative reviews other people had written of the same apartment.

We wanted to apply to a few places to hedge, but this costs some money.  Typically, there’s a non-refundable application fee, and a refundable application deposit–not to be confused with the deposit fee, which is owed upon lease.  We carefully read application agreements to understand under what conditions application deposits would be refunded.  However, I’ve concluded that leasing agents do not read their own contracts.

• One application tried charging us a deposit fee.  This was immediately after the application agreement specifically stated that we owed an application deposit, not a deposit fee.  The leasing office did not respond to requests for clarification.
• One place we applied to sent us e-mail saying we had to pay a deposit fee within 24 hours.  This is suspicious because we hadn’t even been approved yet.  And yes it turns out that e-mail was a lie.  The building had shared our e-mail with a third party finance company who sends out false marketing messages.  We should complain to the CFPB oh wait.
• When we applied to another place, we were approved immediately, and then the leasing agent told us to sign the lease within 24 hours.  He claimed that if we signed the lease and withdrew before moving in, then we would be released from the lease.  The lease agreement itself contained no such provision for withdrawal, and we’d likely be obligated to pay a few months of rent.  My husband sent a legalistic reply asserting that the leasing agent had made an amendment to the leasing agreement, but then we weren’t foolish enough to actually sign the thing.  Never got a reply back.

It would be nice if apartment buildings didn’t pull this BS.  I’d take that over a pool.