I’m looking for a new apartment.
Right in time for the our national holiday – July 1st – Moving Day.
While the rest of the country will be lounging on decks, drinking beer, and cooking meat on the BBQ, I may be forced into joining mes compatriotes in this « Only in Québec » tradition.
I have no real reason to move. Maybe I’m just a masochist: the thought of joining the 120 000 person tango that we call le démenagement turns me on. Maybe I’m just in need of a change: the common complaint I’ve had from all my ex-partners is my fear of commitment. It seems as if this fear not only affects my relationships with people but also my relationship with neighbourhoods.
But as I set off to find the place of my dreams, I quickly remember that apartment hunting ain’t easy. In a society drowning in technology, finding a flat should be as simple as hello. Instead, it has only made the population more unreliable than ever before.
In the old days, if one were offering or looking for a place to live, one would have to write out an advert, and then either pay for it to be posted in a local newspaper or physically affix it to a window or a telephone pole. If the apartment were available July 1st, you would begin advertising it at least 3 months in advance. This process took diligence, perseverance, and zeal. Nevertheless, once started, one saw it through to its bitter end.
Now, with the internet, I could decide today I want to move, put my place up for rent on kijiji tonight, have an open house tomorrow, and be out by the next day. In fact, last year, I did exactly that – and now live with my 2 beautiful roommates.
I have to admit, however, I am marvellously organised. Most Montrealers are not even close to being as sedulous. Online classifieids are brimming with quantity but not quality. Poorly written descriptions, missing contact information, and bold faced lies have become all too common on sites like craigslist and kijiji. 9460 Lajeunesse is NOT near métro Jean-Talon! 4023 Rachel is NOT in the Plateau!
You send a thousand e-mails and receive no reply. You call someone directly and they answer surprised; as if they didn’t even know they had posted an ad online for their place. You arrive for the scheduled visit and no one is home. I honestly believe people get off on making others’ apartment search as miserable as humanly possible. I have this image in my head of a man sniffing the classified section of the Gazette while jerking off to his fellow citizens desperate online replies to his fake « 4 ½ in the Plateau, corner St-Denis and Mont-Royal, $450, ABSOLUMENT À VOIR » ad. Graphic, yes. But it is this image which supplies the necessary rage to fuel my perpetual search.
People have gotten wise to the deceit and manipulation. More and more, I find apartment seekers using alternate media to find the place of their dreams. This month, I’ve already been invited to 5 events on Facebook to help Jenna X. or Mathieu Y. find a home. Twitter is ablaze with desperate calls for housing. Soon you’ll have people shamelessly writing blogs about stipulating the kind of flat they are looking for.
p.s. Je suis à la recherché d’un 3 ½ ou 4 ½, situé dans une zone délimitée par Hutchison à l’ouest, Papineau à l’est, Jean-Talon au nord et Duluth au sud. Du ou triplex préférablement. Dernier étage OU rez-de-chaussé avec petit jardin. Loyer maximum – $700.
APARTMENT HUNTING TIPS
Getting rid of your apartment?
- Use online classifieds. They are fast, free, and you can expect immediate results
- Write a very detailed advert. This avoids having to answer the same questions a hundred times. Give it a relevant title – ex. 3½ – $550 rien inclus – HOMA – métro Frontenac – 1er juin
- Open a temporary e-mail account. Because when you post something online, your mailbox will definitely become flooded with everything from honest replies to propositions of natural male enhancement.
- Determine a date for an open house. It’s a much more efficient way to manage visit to your home.
- Set your newly opened e-mail account to auto-reply. Use your online advert as your message and include your phone number and the time and date of your open house.
- Offer the place to one person and give them 48 hours to reply. If they do not reply, cancel the offer and offer it to someone else.
- Keep a waiting list. Sometimes someone may seem perfect on the outside but bad references and credit can get them rejected by the landlord.
- Delete the post. Don’t let others get their hopes up by going through the trouble to contact you when your place is already off the market. Take down your post immediately upon find a new tenant. Change your auto-reply message accordingly.
- Post a sign outside your house. You usually find the best people with this tried-and-true method, for if they are frequenting your neighbourhood, they are probably just like you.
In need of an apartment?
- Look everywhere. Online. On utility poles. In windows.
- Tell everyone. If you see a buliding you like and someone is outside on the porch, tell them. They may help.
- When contacting a possible lead, always respect this order: Telephone, Carrier pigeon, E-mail. Even a surprise visit is better than e-mail; it forces the other person to deal with you at that very moment.
- Arrive early to see the apartment. It shows how much you want the place.
Check out these links, graciously curated by Kate McDonnell of montreal city weblog to help you with your journey.
And to those in search of their little piece of Montréal: May God be with you.
15 comments
McDonnell. But thanks for the nod.
Those are quite ambitious criteria!
Sorry Kate for that typo! Me and my fat fingers.
The “only in Québec” July 1 moving day used to be May 1, and is an inheritance from our early Scottish residents, who traditionally had a May 1 end-of-lease and payment of rent day.
It was the day the British used to burn out their tenants during the Highland Clearances, too.
My biggest frustration was with apartment size: when I see an ad for a BIG 3 1/2, I don’t expect a small 2 1/2 with a murphy bed…
I may be biased as I co-founded the site, but the apartment hunt always got me down and all the online classifieds out there seem cluttered and antiquated. A couple of buddies and I put this together. Our criteria were (1) clean, (2) simple.
Have a look and let us know what you think!
GOJINDO.COM
B
I’ve been running an apartment search website in Montreal for 12 years now and I am very frustrated when articles like this talk about kijiji and craigslist. Is it necessary to give them free publicity? Kijiji is an international corporation wholly owned by eBay. In fact Kijiji Canada, who only has a small office in Toronto, is losing money because of advertising cost but eBay is bailing them out (for how long?). On the other hand, craigslist doesn’t even have an office or employees in Canada or advertise here. It’s only free in markets where they are not dominant (why else are they charging $75 for a job posting in San Francisco and only 25$ in NYC and free here?). Why do they deserve free publicity, because there are lots of ads listed and lots of people are using it, it’s the chicken and the egg thing then. I’d like to know, really.
It’s on July 1st to distract Quebecers from celebrating Canada Day…
Thank You Fran for clarifying that for me!
I THOUGHT Montreal Moving Day WAS May 1st. 45 years ago.
Another detail in rememberances I had lost.
Was very ugly in 1967 with Expo 67 in town and landlords wanting to rent out apartments by the day for the tourist trade.
The “Moving Day is on July 1st to keep Quebecers from celebrating Canada Day” thing is entirely untrue. Moving Day was moved from May to July so children wouldn’t have their studies disrupted back when Dominion Day was not much more than a summer day off of work. In fact, the politician who introduced the bill (Jérôme Choquette) was a member of the Quebec Liberal Party and a staunch federalist.
Oh, I don’t know.. I wouldn’t be surprised if the July 1st moving date was put in place, or at least supported by locals, to keep Quebecois from celebrating Canada Day.
The July 1st moving date is very inconvenient for people who live in Montreal, at least in my experience. Most post-secondary students finish school at the end of April or end of May and often have to either break their leases a couple of months early, or have to sublet their apartments for 2 months if they want to move when school is finished. Or, many students have to rent apartments in July and sublet them until they start school in September.
Montreal is, at this point, a college town (or UniverCity, as it were). It would be more convenient if the provincial (or at least municipal) moving date was either June 1st or September 1st, at least for the 100,000+ post-secondary students within and around the downtown core.
The big question is why do we persist in doing this annual ratrace at all? There is officially no law that absolutely mandates all leases run July to June. I have had several leases in the past running from Sept to August, June to June, etc. Of course landlords just love to have things synchronized.
Additionally the fact that leases have to run one year at a time (as opposed to one year then month by month as in Ontario) is a horrible lock on renters. If you renew your lease and then discover in October that your company want to transfer you out of the country you’re screwed more or less. Similar problems happen for those who have to move out because of a relationship breakdown, etc.
It all seems to be really stacked in favour of the landlords which is why I am so happy to finally own my own home for the first time.
Another good question is, why is there such a disproportionate amount of renters versus owners in Montreal? Why is it so difficult for low to medium income individuals to qualify for loans so they can own their own homes? Why is the real estate market in Canada stacked against the poor, who are then force to rent their apartments from the rich?
(don’t kid yourselves, even if you have no income, if you own your own home you are indeed rich).
Just want to point out that the unreliability works both ways. My girlfriend is looking to sublet her place for summer. The sheer number of prospective renters who said they’d visit but then never arrived is very disconcerting. She takes time out of her busy day to meet them, greet them and then… nothing. Then there are people who say they’ll take it and then disappear when they actually have to show up and, you know, drop off some cheques and sign a contract. And it’s a beautiful, clean spacious apartment too! No excuse for this. I don’t know if people have become more inconsiderate since the advent of craigslist et all, but it sure does feel like it.
If you’re going to miss an appointment, call ahead and say so — or if you had a bonehead move and forgot or something — call afterwards and apologize. These little niceties go a long way.
I love this article!!!!!! I started to wonder about my sanity when I moved to Montreal 5 months ago and had to find a place. It was hell and I have rented places all over Canada, UK and Taiwan. What a gong show! 1 year leases forever, July 1rst move dates ( thought is was a joke when I heard about it), and for me the real kicker is the appliances. I have no idea why a renter would want to buy and move 4 large appliances every time they move. Is it the landlords who are too cheap or lazy to fix broken appliances or are people here really that picky about their brand of appliances. I have never even heard of renting a place without major appliances…it just doesn’t make sense.
Having 1 year leases that people are desperate to get out of, really just screws everyone over. I ended up taking over a lease of two people moving back to France but because they absolutely had to leave at a certain date they basically lied to me about everything….it was in their best interest to dump the place on whoever they could and get out…..so of course the next person is left with the problems. IN fact, I never even met the landlord just the current tenants, papers were signed and faxed and that was it, no credit check. For all the landlord knew I was a drug dealer. I wasn’t expecting such shadiness from my first days in Montreal….but now I’m getting used it…….or just accepting the insanity.
Now I live somewhere else and it was also hell going through a second move…but I survived and if I have to move again I hope it’s to an old folks home…..