Two weekends ago, Wendy flew up to join me to go apartment hunting.
We’d spent a couple of weekends house-hunting, but the house-hunting
cycle — find a likely candidate house, look at it, wait for the offer
period, make the offer, get into a bidding war — is really tricky when
she doesn’t live in town. We decided to go for the rental option, let
her get familiar with the city and do the house-hunting after she’s
settled down here.
We went looking for rental properties in the
same areas we were looking to purchase a house: an area that
encompassed both Roncesvalles and the High Park area. These areas
represented a decent combination of good neighbourhood, bang for the
buck and closeness to both downtown and family. I’ve enjoyed my stay in
this lovely house in the lovely Queen and Spadina neighbourhood — the arrondissement that made me the Accordion Guy — but it’s time to move on.
Our criteria for a rental property were:
Since
both my housemates were leaving our current house (Paul’s spending the
summer in Europe, while Rob’s moving in with his fiancee) and since
Wendy is still quite busy at work in Boston, that weekend was our only
real shot at landing a place. That meant that we had to be very
prepared for house-hunting.
It took the better part of Thursday
evening to line up a dozen places that met our criteria, and I was able
to arrange appointments to see almost all those places that weekend. In
an attempt to impress Wendy, who’s the type who loves to plan
everything in detail, I prepared a clipboard, with a printed-out Google
map for each place we would visit and wrote notes indicating the time
of our appointment for that apartment, as well as all the known facts
about that place. (She was impressed.) I also took care with the
scheduling to minimize the distance between appointments and to give us
a chance to take a breather between apartments. I even arranged to
“pre-screen” some apartments on Friday afternoon before Wendy arrived,
in the hopes of either finding a must-see place or rule out the dreck. I found both.
Aside from the obvious one of
renting versus owning, there’s one major difference between
apartment-hunting and house-hunting: the variability. Because real
estate is an established and standardized industry with its own
practices and arcana, prices are more or less standardized. Once you’ve
narrowed down your search to a specific neighbourhood and type of
house, you know what you’ll get for a certain amount of money. Even
after only a couple of weekends of house-hunting in the High Park and
Roncesvalles areas, I can tell what a two-bedroom house listing for
$349,000 will have, versus one listing for $369,000 and one where the
asking price is $399,000. That’s because real estate agents have a more
or less standard methodology for pricing houses.
Rentals are
another matter entirely. In most cases, rentals are handled by
landlords, most of whom aren’t in the business of managing rental
properties, but people who hope to make some ongoing income off their
excess real estate. They’re not members of a continent-wide group like
Century 21, and their reasons for renting out their properties vary.
The quality of the places priced in the $1500/month area varied widely.
I
managed to rule out two complete dumps before Wendy arrived. Both were
owned by the same person and located just off Keele Street, in the
tree-lined residential areas between Bloor and Annette. The first one
was the worst of all the places I saw that weekend: a shabby hovel on a
street of decent houses. A pile of junk — presumably left by the last
tenants — leaned against the porch wall that wasn’t missing. I climbed
up a set of oak stairs (the only nice feature of the place) into the
second floor of the house, which while spacious, was a poorly-kept
living room, dining room and den painted salmon pink, with missing
baseboards, badly worn hardwood floors, and covered in grime. A little
more dingy and you could’ve shot the “shooting gallery” scenes from Trainspotting there.
The
house’s single bathroom was a large room, an obvious conversion that
also doubled as a laundry room. The washer and dryer were old, and the
dryer door handle was nowhere to be found. The grouting was coming off
the tiles around the tub, which sat glumly under a slanted shower
curtain rod that someone did a very half-assed job of installing. This
place was so damnably Soviet that I could imagine Yakov Smirnoff rehearsing his
lame-ass gags in this bathroom’s mirror: “Een Soviet Russia, toilet sheeets on you!”
The
upstairs bedrooms were on the third floor of the house, two large rooms
with arched ceilings. They weren’t as shabby as the downstairs, but I’d
lived in better places, even in the student ghetto surrounding Crazy Go
Nuts University.
“You might want to bring an air conditioner or fan for these rooms,” the landlord said, “it’s a little warm.”
That
was an understatement. I could feel the temperature gradient as I was
climbing the stairs. These rooms must be total saunas in July and
August.
The landlord reached someplace odd to turn up the lights.
I took a closer look and found a dimmer — missing its handle,
naturally — mounted not in the wall, but in the door frame.
Closer inspectioned showed that someone, quite probably drunk or high,
had done a really clumsy job dremelling out the space into which a
dimmer was haphazardly shoved.
I decided to take a look at the
landlord’s other house. This one wasn’t as bad a dump as the last one,
having been painted by someone with functioning colour vision. This
house was better cared for, and the landlord has done a little more
work to cover its more obvious (and copious) flaws with a relatively
recent paint job and some cleaning. It was still a step down from the
places that Wendy and I were currently living in, and the washing
machine and dryer’s installation in the foyer at the upstairs landing,
complete with dryer vent spanning the width of the room at an angle. If
I wanted to live in the basement set of That 70’s Show, I would’ve asked.
The
landlord, eager to snag a tenant, gave me a few phone numbers to be
reachable, on the off chance that I suffered some kind of head injury
and decided to move into one of those hovels. I threw them away at my
first opportunity.
Next: Better places!
