Pollito con Reina: House Hunting

Otherwise known as the moving saga part 2.

Before we left the Bay Area, I joked with people that Pollo and I would film our own version of the tv show "House Hunters"to show everyone what our crazy house hunt was like. We always laughed at how the couples always wanted different things and went on a whirlwind house hunting spree. Little did we know we were in for our own whirlwind house hunt, at least we had talked before we spoke with any leasing agents so we knew what we wanted more or less.

When we went down to Maryland to spend the weekend at Pollo's aunt and uncles we spent an obscene amount of time searching for places to live. Before arriving in Pennsylvania we thought that we could live in Lancaster, Pa because that would give Pollo access to the company distribution center in Harrisburg and it seemed more centrally located so that he could make his various retailer visits all across the state. However, on our first drive through of the area and when we really sat down to look at where the retailers were located, Lancaster was too far out of the way to live.

We learned that the previous manager lived in King of Prussia (which is closer to Philadelphia) because it gave him access to a lot of freeways and was pretty close to Philadelphia and a lot of the top level retailers are located close to Philadelphia. So, we turned our sights from Amish country to suburban Philadelphia. Pollo was starting work in earnest the second week we arrived in PA so we had one week to find a place and move in! Yes, we could have spent longer looking for places, but with Pollo working it would limit us to weekend searching and every day we spent not in a permanent place to live would mean we had to pay for temp housing ($$$).

Monday was not as productive as we thought because we spent a lot of time calling people and setting up appointments. When calling for an appointment I learned to first ask if they had immediate (like end of the week) availability and that got rid of about a quarter of the places we had picked out.

One thing that was frustrating was that every single place was a community. By searching online there were less than 2 places that were rented out individually. No one was renting houses or personally owned apartments. Even driving through small town(ships?) we never saw signs for rentals. Maybe if we had found the local newspaper we could have found more, but even the front desk guy at the (pretty great) Best Western in King of Prussia didn't have great ideas except for online and a pamphlet of rental communities.

We also learned to judge a place by its cover. It it had a cheezy/horribly outdated website, chances were high that the place would also be a little funky and outdated. Along those same lines, the places that had awesome websites and lots of amenities were waay out of our price range. One of the communities had tanning beds in its gym! Some of the places offered lots of amenities included and some had none. Some of the places also use variable pricing which they explained to us was like airline pricing. The price of a certain type of apartment was dependent on how many of them were available on the day you move in. The price that the company quotes you is good for a maximum of 48 hours and can vary by up to $100. It really pushes the renter to make a decision quickly.

Our second day was much more productive and we spent from 8:30-6:00 on the hunt and by the time we went to sleep we had narrowed it down to two different places.

We were between a really awesome place with an open plan kitchen and really nice amenities that was a little further out of the way and a larger place that also had nice amenities, but was on the edge of an area that everyone we had talked to warned us away from. We looked up renter's reviews on the Apartment Ratings Website and found out that place A was dangerously close to a university and that all the university kids live there. This means lots of late night parties and no parking after 5pm. While we don't consider ourselves old fogies, living in a place with loud parties is not really our scene. For place B, we didn't find any horrible reviews and using Neighborhood Scout we figured out that it was in the best area of the bad neighborhood. We figured it was like Oakland, or really any city, with good and bad parts and we'd take the chance and go with place B. It also gave us more space (2bd, 2 bath, and a dining room!), a gas stove, lots of parking and put us closer to major freeways.

On Wednesday morning we returned to our chosen apartment community and put in our application before returning to Maryland to relax and collect all our things. Our application was approved and we moved in on Saturday! We officially completed a cross country move in a week. Go Team!
Here are some pictures of our new place! We were so relieved to find a place to call our very own.