Bryan D. Brown

After two weeks of apartment hunting (a short amount of time in the Santa Barbara market), it looks like Jennifer and I finally found a place. Well, two places to be exact. We have one hell of a decision to make. Both places are almost exactly the same price - one is located in a very rural part of Goleta with plenty of amenities (i.e. dishwasher, washer and dryer, etc), yet has a five minute walk to the beach and is a 20 minute bike ride to work. The other place is on State Street within walking distance of three markets, several stores, three bars and a coffee shop. Both are about the same size. We’ve really gone back and forth - with us favoring one place, then the other, and then back in one conversation alone. After Jennifer and I debated the decision for a few hours, I called my father for advice, which is often brilliant in its simplicity, and he suggested we flip a coin and be done with it.

The good news is that no matter what we decide, we’re pretty happy to be moving. Either place will be infinitely better than where we are now, and that’s a good thing. We’re not having to settle for a dump - and in our search, we’ve seen some real doosies. All together, we looked at close to 20 different places, and of those found no more than four acceptable in terms of up keep - the rest needed some serious help.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our one experience with a certain management company (who shall remain nameless) with which we dealt. We saw several of their listings online, so we dropped by their office to pick up some keys. $20 deposit per key and if we weren’t back by 3pm we’d lose our deposit. That seemed odd, but we had three hours for four places ($80 deposit), so we had plenty of time. Once we visited the listings in person, we wanted both our deposit and our 45 minutes back.

One apartment had all of the baseboards removed, had an 8-inch hole in the bathroom door, and the edges of the brown carpet (I use the term “brown” loosely) were black. There was some funky odor as well - and not funky in a cool Sly & the Family Stone way. And they were showing it in this condition. Uh, no thank you. To quote Jennifer, “They need to give me $20 because I had to see this place.” It was a crank dealer’s dream - the kind of place in which you’d expect to see Detectives Stabler and Benson conducting an investigation. The other apartments weren’t much better. I think we returned those keys in 45 minutes, with about two hours to spare before the 3pm deadline. Only the last of the apartments we saw was decent enough to consider - but by that time, we had pretty much decided that these people didn’t deserve our business. I really regret not bringing our digital camera along for that little excursion.

My personal favorite, however, was the website of a different management company. They posted this photo, with “click to enlarge” written below, in one of their listings at their website:

Okay, fine. Not the greatest glimpse of what is going on, so I’ll “click to enlarge”, as they so kindly offered:

Wonderful. If that photo doesn’t display a remarkable level of ineptitude (or maybe it’s contempt), I don’t know what else could. It really instills confidence in folks to whom you are paying $1100 every month, which is the listed rent for that apartment. I take some comfort in knowing that they’ve had that listing up for weeks, if not months, so I’m not the only one who isn’t falling for that garbage. On another level, I’m fairly certain it is these kinds of people who drive 45 MPH on the freeway, or try to use the grocery store’s express lane with 30 items in their basket.

In any case, it looks like we’ll finally be moving into a more permanent and nicer setting in the next few weeks, and bringing an end to this rather tedious process - and none too soon.