Best place to start looking for an apartment?

Have you looked at Craigslist?

check this out…...........

http://www.chicagoapartmentfinders.com/

In an apartment complex.

try www.rent.com

cool thanks

i have used rent.com a few times before. they always offer you 100$ off from the first month’s rent if you go through them. (and they don’t charge you for finding any apartment through them)

If you know the area where you want to live, I would walk around there. Sometimes people put up For Rent signs, but do not even advertise. You can also find places for rent on community bulletin boards in grovery stores, newsstands, coffee shops, etc.

You can also use the newspaper. You can get the Sunday classifieds on Saturday.

One of my friends just moved to Hyde Park and she’s renting from MAC Apartments. She says it’s a mixed review. There were a lot of problems with the place, but they’ve been really responsive about fixing them. For my part, I like the management office—water bottles and cookies! They own like half of the apartments in Hyde Park so there is a good chance you’ll end up with them.

I don’t know why you are moving there, but if it is for/through University of Chicago, definitely do NOT take temporary student housing or their faculty housing or whatever. A different friend did both of those options and her apartments were awful—small, no a/c, and very, very expensive. She thought it really screwed her over.

There are problems with all the various Chicago apartment finders (of which there are many). But most of them are free so an appointment can’t hurt. Just pay attention to how they act when they take you around—especially the parts about notice they gave to the people living there and how they treated the place. If you rent from somewhere they show you, chances are your landlord will use them again when you move out. You don’t want finders coming at all times, being rude, locking you out. You would probably want notice. So watch to see if they give notice.

Try the Reader online. It’s a local free paper than generally has some pretty good listings. I found my current place in the Reader—it was a super, super value and I love my landlady.