4 Reasons Apartment Hunting Sucks

There's no reason to lie about this: I'm searching for a new apartment right now. There's also no reason to lie about this: I hate doing it. It's the worst thing. Searching for an apartment is just one of the many aspects of adulthood no one warns you about. I'm here to warn you about it, to serve as a warning and say that Apartment Hunting is a big, fat piece of shit.

This is going to sound like an exaggeration, but believe me when I say that no one who has ever tried to sell an apartment online has any idea how to take photographs. Not one. A lot of renters don't even post pictures of their apartment online, and that's fine, it just means no one is ever going to live there. Some renters will just hang out in an apartment with a buddy, toss the camera back and forth and publish whatever pictures accidentally get snapped in the process. They look at pictures like this...

...and they think "Yes, these are representative of my apartment. This provides future renters with all of the information they would need to make a decision. I'm gonna go ahead and publish these to the internet, and then I'm going to see if I can swallow my own tongue, because I'm not very bright at all." You're right, shockingly-self-aware-fictitious-renter, you are an idiot. Now, while I made the above pictures to prove a point, I could have just as easily picked any random apartment ad. Like this one!

Someone has one shot to make you fall in love with their apartment online, and those were the only pictures they found necessary to post. I have no idea what rooms I'm looking at or if this place even has a toilet. What these pictures say to me is "Come live here, we probably have most of a kitchen!" If you look at the difference between Photo 1 and Photo 2, it's clear that their camera is capable of taking wide shots, which means they intentionally cropped out portions of their second photo. "Sure, this is all part of the apartment, but I don't think they need to know about most of this space; let's trim some of that fat and just show them the door, that's all they're looking for."

Some other renters do include pictures, but only pictures of the exterior, or the street around the apartment...

The only pictures associated with one listing.

What do they expect? No future tenant is going to say "A pool and what is clearly some bushes? I've seen all I need to see- I'll take it!" That person doesn't exist. Some landlords do include pictures, but they'll add some douchey, aggravating fisheye lens, which is their subtle way of saying "Look, I own a fisheye lens!"

When I look at this, I feel like all of the rooms are saying "BooOOOooww!"

Unless the rooms actually look like that, (which, if they do- what?), don't include it in your ad. We only want to see what your apartment really looks like, (we're weird like that). And, if you want people to rent your apartment, there is no benefit to being misleading in your ad. It's almost like some people are trying to scam us, but like, in a really misguided way...

While searching for apartments, you'll learn a new, secret language unique to apartment ads. You'll see words like "Cozy" and "Charming" and "Certainly Not Covered In Ants, If That's What You're Worried About," and you'll learn after visiting a few places that they actually stand for "Tiny," "Mostly Nonfunctioning In A Variety of Unique Ways," and "Just Fucking Ants, Everywhere, Man, I Don't Even Know What To Do Anymore."

It's beautiful, but yeah, the ants control the rent.

And if they're not dressing up a tiny, broken apartment in creative language, then they're just withholding information. They'll leave out pictures of the kitchen, they'll describe their square footage as "unspecified," and in the part of the ad where they're supposed to tell you if the unit comes with parking, they'll dodge the question and say "Great view of things you should check it out so close to a Whole Foods!"

"If you like parking, you'll love paying too much for groceries!"

They don't want to tell you any of the bad things about the apartment, but I honestly don't see a scenario wherein this con actually pays off. If you're apartment doesn't have a kitchen, even if you don't include it in your ad, I'm eventually going to find out. If you're selling a bullshit product over the internet, I can understand being less-than-truthful in your description. But that's a product, where it's much easier to trick someone into sending you money. There doesn't seem to be any benefit in lying in your ad if your endgame requires me to look at your apartment before signing anything. Also, lying makes you seem less legitimate, you're almost like one of those terrible internet scammers. Oh, hey!