Out of at least 10 calls, only one called back. The worst night was when a co-worker and I drove around Bankers Hill calling every apartment building we saw. Plus, it wasn’t nearly as cheap as I had hoped. A lot of posters did not put an address, only had one terrible picture, and I could waste a whole night driving out there. Yet, even those far away searches were pretty awful on Craigslist. My goal of living near work or the beach had to be thrown out.

I even went old school and checked out the San Diego Union-Tribune rentals page.Īs the search dragged on I began considering areas outside the city, like El Cajon, Lemon Grove, Chula Vista, National City and Imperial Beach. I stayed up late into the night at the Motel 6 sifting through more and more postings on Craigslist, which had the most listings and updated more quickly than other sites I used - Apartment List, Padmapper,, Live Lovely. If it was perfect, the landlord didn’t allow cats. If the price fit my budget, the apartment was smack dab on a major intersection with no street parking. If the inside of the place looked nice, it usually meant the neighbor was blasting music through thin walls.

The next dozen or so apartments were pretty similar. Still, three people showed up to see it in the 15 minutes I was there. Its floorboards were warped, all the appliances looked at least 30 years old (and not in a cool, charming way) and it was boiling hot inside.

The first apartment I saw was a dive in North Park for $1,295 a month that looked like it was about to collapse. It took just two days for me to fight against every thrifty bone in my body to increase what I would spend from $1,250 to $1,300 to $1,350. Out of 129,706 apartments in the MarketPointe study, 3,669 were vacant. County studios rented for an average $1,301 a month in September and a one bedroom was $1,401. The county as a whole is fairly similar, says MarketPointe Realty Advisors, which conducts a wider rental survey of large apartment complexes. The average rent in San Diego for a one-bedroom unit is $1,460 a month, according to the San Diego County Apartment Association, and the city has a low vacancy rate of 4.2 percent. Ignorance of what neighborhood I was in most of the time was exacerbated only by a rental market that has seen prices increase - up to 6 percent in the last 12 months - and vacancy rates plummet.

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