You`re looking for an apartment. You could research different cities and neighborhoods, call the landlords, set up appointments, drive yourself to each prospect and squint at the tiny type in those endless rental columns every day until you have a headache.
Or you could have someone else do it for you.
That is essentially the service offered by Chicago`s apartment-finding agencies. More than half a dozen companies in the Chicago area have built a business on the notion that time- and patience-strapped apartment seekers will flock to anyone who promises to shorten the search.
The dynamics are simple: Renters are looking for apartments and landlords are looking for tenants. An apartment finder acts as a sort of matchmaker that brings the two together.
For this service, it is paid a fee by each landlord for whom it locates a tenant. The service is free to renters, whether or not they sign a lease.
There`s little an apartment-finding agency does for renters that renters can`t do themselves by investing some time and effort in their search. As with any service, what apartment finders offer is convenience.
”Yes, I could do it on my own,” said Sandra Moore, vice president of RELCON, an apartment agency with several offices in the Chicago area. ”I could do a lot of things on my own. I could change the oil in my own car-but I prefer to go to Jiffy Lube.”
How they work
Renters who contact a service will first be interviewed by an agent, a process that may take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. After determining what rent the client is willing to pay and what kind of building or neighborhood he desires, the agent suggests several units from what may be hundreds or thousands of listings on hand.
The agent arranges appointments with building managers to see the apartments and in many cases chauffeurs the client to each site. When a client makes a choice, the agency frequently will expedite credit checks and landlord approval and take care of the lease.
Apartment-finding services have appeal for both building owners and renters. For building owners, they`re a source of credit-worthy tenants for vacant units. For renters, they`re a means of compressing the often-lengthy process of finding new digs into as little as a day or two.
But before handing over the controls of their apartment search to a service, prospective tenants should know what-and what not-to expect.
For instance, people with a bad credit or job history will probably do no better finding an apartment through an agency than they will on their own.
”Everyone thinks we`re miracle workers,” said Tim Wiley, president of Chicago Apartments and Condos, an apartment-finding agency in Wrigleyville.
”Renters think that because we may have 1,000 units to fill, they can get the sun, the moon and the stars for nothing. Landlords think we can get them a higher rent and a certain type of tenant.
”Both are pushing the reality of the situation a little bit.”
The fact is, some property managers list only their slower-to-move apartments with rental agencies.
”Only 40 percent of the buildings we manage let us use agencies,” said Gary Kass, president of Kass Management Services, a Chicago-based property management firm. ”Some of my owners have very desirable units that do well on their own.”
Kass uses the services most in the off-season-Oct. 1 to April 30-while other management firms turn to them only when the market is flooded with apartments, as in May.
Renting directly to tenants saves landlords the apartment-finders` fee, a sum generally equal to one month`s rent on any apartment for which they find a tenant.
Still, most Chicago area apartment-finding services report that business is brisk. The eight area offices of Elmhurst-based RELCON, for example, saw 6,699 clients in the first 18 weeks of this year alone.
The Apartment People, headquartered in Lincoln Park, sees an average of 400 clients a week, said Susan Coleman, advertising and marketing director. The 6-year-old agency estimates that business is growing by about 30 percent a year.
Despite recent growth, however, apartment-finding services have been slower to develop here than in some other cities. Property managers here use the firms as a supplemental source of tenants, but many haven`t forgotten Metro Rental Services.
Metro was sued by the Cook County state`s attorney`s office in 1984 for deceptive practices and fraudulent advertising. The firm, which has since closed, was charged with taking first-month rent money and security deposits from prospective renters for apartments that weren`t available.
”It was a disaster,” said Kass. ”From the landlord`s perspective it set back apartment rental agencies by five years.”
City-minded
Many apartment services are clustered on the North Side, although some also cover the suburbs. RELCON, for example, covers Chicago and about 100 suburbs from Zion south to western Indiana.
But many agency owners say it`s the highly transient population in Lincoln Park, the Gold Coast and other densely populated Chicago neighborhoods that creates the biggest demand for their services.
Some agencies report that many of their clients are local residents who represent repeat business. Roommates change, or renters make more money and want to trade up. By scheduling apartment inspections through an agency, renters avoid the annoying experience of getting stood up by janitors, agents say.
But perhaps the single biggest source of business for the agencies is out-of-towners. The agencies court area corporations for referrals to employees relocating to the area, new hires fresh out of school and interns who`ll be in town for training programs.
The Apartment People, for example, has longstanding relationships with firms such as Arthur Andersen, Leo Burnett and Jenner & Block.
”I`d say more than half of the clients who come in are from outside Chicago,” said RELCON`s Moore. ”We give them train schedules, talk about the geography of the area and go over basics that may not be the same here as in the state they come from.”
A day to do it
Last year Becky Schirmacher had one weekend in the Chicago area in which to find an apartment after she and her husband, Gary, arranged job transfers from Dearborn, Mich. On the recommendation of a family member, she contacted RELCON.
”They pretty much assured us that we`d find a place in one day,” she said. She started with a two-hour interview with an agent to discuss what the couple could afford and what they were looking for. What they wanted, Schirmacher said, was ”convenience to our jobs, a community in which we could raise a family” and a building that would accept their cat.
The agency`s computerized listings yielded 29 options, from which Schirmacher chose nine possibilities. The agent arranged for her to see all nine units and mapped out a route so Schirmacher could drive herself to each building.
When her husband arrived the next day, the list had been narrowed to three. The lease application and credit check for the Woodridge apartment they chose was provided by the building`s management and the lease was approved a few days later, she said.
”At first I was kind of leery about using the service because I thought I would end up paying for it,” she said. ”But it was free.”
Gretchen Brinker, an actress, said the Apartment People helped her out of a jam when she was relocating to Chicago from Orlando without a steady job two years ago. After getting verbal approval on a lease at one of four apartments the agency showed her during a weeklong visit to Chicago, she returned to Orlando to find that the landlord had changed his mind about renting the unit. The agency started over again at Square 1. It reinspected Brinker`s second choice, resubmitted her lease application, got it approved by the new landlord and secured her lease within two days.
”Being back in Florida, I couldn`t have gotten into the apartment without them,” said Brinker, who, since moving to Chicago, has taken a job with the agency.
The Apartment People has also pushed through lease applications for frantic renters who showed up at its front door with filled moving vans, said Coleman, and it has even worked with the federal government to relocate a person in the Witness Protection program.
The drawbacks
But while agencies sometimes go above and beyond the call of duty to help clients, prospective renters should remember that agencies are subsidized by the landlords that pay them to find tenants-and only those landlords.
Some landlords don`t use agencies, preferring instead to find their own tenants. As a result, agencies` listings, while extensive in some cases, aren`t all-inclusive. So, by depending on a service, renters may be missing a chance to see good apartments-ones they might prefer.
They may also find that when they call an agency to see an apartment that`s been advertised, it`s no longer available, and they`re instead referred to other listings. While renters may suspect bait and switch, the agencies contend that good apartments go fast, and they`re often rented by the time the ad comes out.
Renters should also be sure to establish that any improvements offered by the agent are backed by the landlord. Building owners vary on whether they`ll deliver on unauthorized promises made by overeager agents.
”It`s important that the agency doesn`t promise service that the landlord hasn`t agreed to supply,” said Ray Fleischer, properties manager of Parliament Enterprises, which manages apartment buildings in Chicago and Evanston. ”There`s a big difference between cleaning and sanding a floor, for instance-about $500.”
A good agency will spend time with clients to assess their needs before showing them any apartments. For a worker who wants to live near the Loop, for example, a trip to see a unit in Rogers Park is a waste of time.
Renters should consider how long the agency has been in business;
generally, the longer in operation, the better. While it`s a pretty young industry in Chicago, the very newest rental agencies have had less time to develop a track record.
