these are three unhinged things you need to do before choosing your next apartment, a good life hack to know. Number one is that a good life hack to know if your apartment is in a safe area. 1. Call a pizza place + ask if they deliver there at night. Right near it and ask them if they deliver there at night. If they don't deliver to that specific apartment at night, it means that that area has a history of being unsafe. This is especially really good if you can't tour the apartment in person because you're out of state or something. But if you are in person, in addition to calling, I would also recommend visiting the apartment one day at 10 PM and then the next day at 2 AM. 2. Ask the PM team questions. I ask a lot of questions when it comes to this apartment stuff first, because genuinely wanna know, bc I don't like surprises and then find out that I can't do this or this is not there. So I need to know everything upfront. And second, because I wanna see how they react to my questions. If I'm emailing back and forth with a property manager or I'm calling her to answer my questions, I think that's a red flag. Mind you, I'm not asking questions that I can't find online. I'm asking genuine questions. So if you don't wanna answer my questions when you're trying to get me to move into your apartment, that means they really don't care lol. It's gonna be a nightmare when I have something in the current apartment I live in now, that I lived in before, I asked a lot of questions and they were really all of them and they were so nice and they were always like, let me know if you have any more questions versus the ones that I called that already had bad reviews online. They did not want to answer any of my questions. Do your research. Don't be asking them questions that you can get online, bc that's just wasting their time. I think you should be asking questions that you can't find online, that you actually wanna know about. I'm gonna do a separate video on questions that you could ask, so make sure to stay tuned for that. Next is 3. Get reviews outside of Google. Get real-time reviews from people who live there now or people who did live there. Google reviews are not enough to look at, bc not everyone is writing reviews. I'm only writing a bad review, I'm only writing a really, really bad experience. So it's good to hear from people who maybe didn't have such a bad experience, but maybe they had like a mediocre experience or even a good one. What you're gonna do is join the Facebook group chat of the apartment is located in. For an apartment in Newark, NJ, join the Newark, NJ FB group page. There's probably gonna be a bunch and post that you're looking to move into this apartment and you'd love to hear from people who live there. They can answer anonymously, or they can DM you if they don't want it to be public. A lot of people are gonna respond to your post on a lot of apartments actually have referral programs. So you can choose one of the people who tell you all this about the apartment, and if the apartment has an incentive program off of their rent, they're gonna get money off of their rent for referring you. So people are gonna tell you what's up. Let me know if you guys have a part two. I have a lot of tips when it comes to this stuff.
