I’m heading to New Canadian City tonight to spend a few days apartment-hunting. I’m also going to attempt to collect my work permit (I’ve been approved, but you can’t get the permit until you’re actually in Canada), sign up for a Social Insurance Number so my university can process my contract, and maybe sign up for a bank account. I’m nervous about navigating the city on my own, but hopeful that when I return to Boston on Friday, I’ll have a lease on a new place.
I’ve set up appointments with 5 landlords so far, and they all seem nice. But I also spent 20 minutes on the phone with one of them while s/he told me about hir health problems, hir dog’s health problems, the status of hir government pension, and how hir children never visit. It reminded me of the time another grad student cornered me during a conference lunch and proceeded to tell me all about hir grant application woes and how Famous Scholar X was “out to get” hir, in excruciating and somewhat inappropriate detail. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, it’s just that I never know what to say when a stranger starts telling me such personal stuff! Is there something about my voice that subliminally instructs people to confide their personal problems in me? Or do some folks just like to overshare?
If anyone has last-minute tips on questions to ask prospective landlords, fire away!
This happened to me last week! I was meeting with a university administrator to talk about conference space (exciting, I know) and within 15 minutes of meeting this person, they were telling me all about how their husband and just died and how they had taken six months off of work to take care of them, etc. Totally heartbreaking, of course, but I was also confused as to why they were telling a total stranger all of this (and what exactly I could say beyond, “I’m so sorry” over and over). Sometimes I wonder if it’s me, because this does happen to me often enough. (Actually I was apartment hunting for a friend last year, and in the process of signing the lease for them the landlord started weeping and telling me all about how her father had recently died. It turned out she was a raging alcoholic, though, and this was pretty much a nightly occurrence. So.)
Good luck with the apartment hunting!
Friendly landlords are great. Oversharing landlords are horrible. Avoid!
Good luck on the work permit! As for the apartment search, I have a 2 page list of questions we used, but they aren’t really atypical or anything….just things I wanted to make sure to consider when looking at each apartment. Email if you want a copy (I think you can probably see my email from this comment?), but I assume you probably have a mental (or physical) list like this already.
Good luck!!!
[…] No, the most memorable part of yesterday was the visit with the oversharing landlady I mentioned in this post. (I’m abandoning gender neutrality at this point, since I doubt the landlady would ever […]
I ignored the Red Flags from my landlord when I started grad school. Stupid. I will never do that again.
We had agreed that I would rent the place. Five hours later, she called to raise the rent. I should have told her forget it right then, but it was a perfect little duplex in the perfect location.
I thought that we were done. Everything was settled.
Then I moved in. The “for sale” sign went back up. Yep. The place was for sale. I would not have rented had I known.
I left the blinds up. Michelle, the landlady, came into the house to lower them and told me I couldn’t leave them up. She also removed my plants from the windowsill.
Her husband would call me to complain about his wife. She would stop by my place when I wasn’t home “just to get a glass of water.”
Real estate agents brought customers all the time. She went through four agents in 8 months. The last one told me that nobody in Austin would work with her because she was such a bitch.
I will never ever ever ignore my gut on something like that again.