We both come from small farming communities in central and southern Illinois. Our previous adventures in apartment hunting took place in Champaign, a city of less than 100,000 and we bought our home outside of White Heath, a town of less than 1,000.
So when the call came on Dec. 19 that I'd gotten the Upshot job, we were a little concerned about finding a nice place to live.
We had a lot of things to look for and a Junior Copywriter's salary to pay for it.
First a neighborhood we'd be comfortable raising the PeeJ in. Given that the closest neighbor I had growing up lived a quarter of a mile a way and that my wife's closest neighbor growing up was her grandfather, we both had pretty lofty expectations of the neighborhood we're looking for.
This immediately added either an hour to my commute or $300/month in rent. We found what we thought would be a nice 2 bed place for a reasonable price on Craigslist only to find the neighborhood was a who's who of the ISOR and state-HQ of the Future ISOR of America.
Secondly, we needed at least 2 Bedrooms, but wanted 3. This, as with the previous stipulation led to the previous two trade-offs or to some crawl-spaces being creatively titled as "Bedrooms."
I wish I was joking.
We visited two separate places that claimed to have 2 "bedrooms." I'm not sure who is sleeping in these rooms, but I honestly could not have laid down in these "bedroom" without my head and feet touching the opposite sides of the room. Although I may have been able to have lain down diagonally without touching both sides of the room.
Third, we wanted to keep our pets.
Now I understand that sometimes pets destroy things, and if you don't want pets in your building that's fine I understand. But do not tell me pets are fine, then when I'm looking over your lease have a amendment that says we'll pay an extra $300 non-refundable damage deposit for each, yes I said each, of our pets.
So we went on line to find our perfect apartment. Some people posted the same apartment on multiple sights. One agent tried to tap her internal copywriter for her subject headings in Craigslist and other sites (unfortunately, she had not read Jeff's infamous 10 commandments of copywriting and went over the top with borrowed interest.) Other's listed all the great little amenities in the apartment while noticeably skirting the more important factors like, does this apartment have heat. Eventually we settled on 9 places to tour on our whirlwind trip to Chicago, basing them on the descriptions of the neighborhoods and a little creative use of Google Maps street view function.
Of those 9 only 4 actually bothered to call us back when we left messages about coming up to tour the apartment.
And you know which one we went with, the apartment we never saw on-line. It was down the street from the first place we looked at, in the Ravenswood Manor neighborhood. There was a simple "For Rent" sign, with a phone #. The landlord answered and was friendly and informative. He said he could meet us the next day at 2. The apartment was wonderful, the neighborhood was perfect, the rent was incredibly high.
But hey 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
But the point to all of this is sometimes you've got to think about where you're putting your ad and the type of executions you're coming up with. These rental agents all spent so much time on their web listings, writing creative prose to tweak our interest in their all hardwood bathrooms (again, I wish I were joking) that they neglected to actually post "For Rent" signs on the actual property. And they may have lost potential renters because of it.
The same goes in advertising, sometimes we get caught up coming up with the next HBO Voyeur or the the True Beauty executions that we forget to post "For Rent" signs for our client.
Talk at you Later,
PJL
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