At this point you have identified your budget, location and the unit type, unit size, unit amenities and property amenities you are seeking. The next step is to conduct elementary online research with a quality apartment search service to identify properties which best fit your criteria.
Think of the apartment search service as a giant funnel. It will help you to reduce a list of thousands of apartments available in your metropolitan area (if you are using a search service which offers information on all available apartments) to perhaps just five to 20 apartments. Each step in the filtering or funneling process will reduce the pool of apartments you are considering.
The first step is to identify location and budgeted rent. Next limit your search by the number of bedrooms. Then limit the search by the number of bathrooms. At this point, if there are still more than five to 20 apartments which fit your criteria, start considering the unit amenities and project amenities which are most important to you. Try adding one amenity at a time instead of initially adding 10 or 20 amenities. If you initially add too many amenities, it will likely reduce the number of apartments to an unacceptably small number, or perhaps even zero.
Each revision to your selection criteria and query should take no more than one or two minutes. You should complete the apartment search service research in no more than five or 10 minutes. This will provide a list of five to 20 apartments which best fit your criteria and have the best pricing.
Apartment locators get paid by sending you to an apartment complex which pays them a portion of the monthly rent you pay. (Do they want to find the least expensive apartment for you?) Their fee ranges from 50% to 125% of the monthly rent. Apartment locators will not tell you about apartment complexes which do not pay a locator fee. They will only discuss apartments which will pay them a fee. This is fairly understandable. However, they will primarily focus upon the apartments which will pay them the highest locator fee. So, in reality you are seeing a subset of a subset. (Consider this analogy. If you were buying a car, they would show you the green model with all available accessories, with the extended warranty.) You are seeing the apartments which pay the highest fees to locators. You're not seeing any of the apartments which do not pay locators a fee. And you're probably not seeing many of the apartments which pay a relatively modest fee.
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