Tales From the Apartment Hunt: Weirdest Landlord Situation

I saw my first potential apartment the day after I arrived. I was still in a confused and exhausted state, so luckily Kate was available to come with me. The ad had caught my eye because it was in my price range and said that all the roommates were grad students. The contact person was very chatty and wanted to give me detailed directions and have me call him when I got off the train. At first I had thought he was one of the roommates, but when we arrived it was clear that he was the landlord. He had Kate and I come into his living room, sit down, and talk a little. He asked me about my grad program and my background, and he in turn told me about himself, how long he has been renting the place, about the neighborhood, and a bit about the spaces in the apartment. Eventually, he decided he was ready to show the room, and took us next-door and upstairs. It was a six-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms, and a relatively small kitchen/living room space. There were two available rooms, and each came furnished with a bed, a desk, a dresser, and small flat screen TV mounted to the wall and wired with cable. There was also a bedroom apartment in the basement that shared the same entrance. There were no rooms available in that area, but he decided to show it to us anyway. Then he took us back into his place to talk some more. When I had a question about something, he took us back in to see some things again. Then we went back to his place and chatted some more. The whole process took about an hour.

The more I thought about it, the more the “reasonable” price started to seem exorbitant. The spaces were small, the commitment was long (1 year), and it was relatively far south in Brooklyn. Kate pointed out that, while it was great for the landlord to only rent to “responsible” grad students, it meant that he was hand picking the renters rather than the roommates having any say about who they wanted to live with. In addition to choosing the roommates, he had also selected all of the furniture, decided to install TVs with cable (something that I didn’t really need or want to pay for), and seemed pretty comfortable just letting himself in to all areas of the building. You got the sense that you would walk into the bathroom one morning and he would be there re-filling the toilet paper and asking you why you use generic brand floss. He described himself as a “hands-off” landlord though, so maybe I should have ignored all the red flags and taken it.