Best time to look for a New Haven apartment starting Aug. 1?

January 10, 2007 5:31 AM

When is the best time to look for an apartment in New Haven with an August 1 lease?

Most of this apartment-hunt is going to be Chicago-based, but there will be a chance for a brief visit to New Haven. The question is how to time that visit for the best chance at finding a place.

posted by veggieboy to home & garden (3 comments total)

I would try 1-2 months prior, having set up appointments to check out apartments and being ready to put down a deposit if you find the right apartment right then & there.
posted by tastybrains at 5:47 AM on January 10, 2007

I'm actually moving there soon myself, but I have the advantage of only living 40 minutes away and I know where the crappy sections of town are.

One note is that New Haven is a HUGE college town. If you are going to be associated with Yale, check out the internal listings. As a corrolary to that, there will be a lot of June/end of school year listings going up in the spring, which you will likely miss.

But to answer your main question - 1-2 months, preferably around 1.5 months. The listings barely go up 2 months in advance outside of the big complexes.
posted by cobaltnine at 10:03 AM on January 10, 2007

There are some complexes in New Haven where you can submit applications earlier - C.A. White managed buildings, for example. (I lived in one for a year, and I would definitely recommend them as landlords.) I was thinking of moving back to New Haven last year (situation changed), and applied to C.A. White again in either March or April, but specified that I was most interested in a Sept 1 opening, though I would consider any from July 1 on. They were really nice, and just put me down on a waitlist for July.

I was a graduate student in New Haven (before going away to do research), so I got to watch the annual apartment scramble. I seem to remember most people starting to look for apartments in late March, early April (for anything coming up early), but generally only found places more in May, mostly for June and July openings. So, 1-2 months for visiting sounds fine.

If you have any questions about New Haven, please feel free to email me. I know most of the areas (I took to walking around a lot). Will you be working or studying there, and where will you be based? Do you want to be very close to your work/school, or just go for the area you want? I really wanted to be within easy distance of downtown (and the university library), and I loved living on Howe St, but many others I knew definitely wanted to be up in the leafy, more suburban area closer to East Rock. (It's known as the "Grad Ghetto", for the large number of graduate students living there, but it's about as far from the ghetto as you can get in New Haven - the houses were huge, and the ones that weren't broken up into flats were mansions.)

(sorry, househunting is always exciting for me, especially when I know the area)
posted by jb at 3:01 PM on January 10, 2007