by Moe Zilla

Created on: July 27, 2010

There's two very obvious choices when you're looking for online apartment listings. Obviously, every web site will claim that they've got the best listings, but in some cases they'll only have a small fraction of the available apartments. Ideally you'd want to visit a single destination where you could review everything that's available, all in one visit. I've lived in several states, and searched for apartments in several cities. Here's a list of the best places to look.

* Craigslist. The biggest advantage of Craigslist is that everybody knows about it - and it's also one of the cheapest places where apartments can be advertised. This makes Craigslist especially handy if you're looking for the cheapest possible rent, since this would be where you'd find individuals looking to sublet their apartment at a reduced rent. But even experienced apartment managers know that they can't overlook all the potential renters who will automatically check Craigslist as their first stop. And Craigslist makes it possible to delete listings instantly just as soon as a unit is rented. This is its biggest advantage over printed newspapers and magazines with apartment listings - so there's no guarantee that the listed apartments are still available!

* Newspaper classified ads. Twenty years ago, the best place to look for apartment listings was always in the local newspaper. But even today, newspapers still earn a lot of their money from advertising, and they'll work hard to adapt their popular "classifieds" section to the web. Just identify the top newspapers in your new city, and then visit their web site to find their online classified ads.

There's still lots of other ways to find housing online. For example, if you're a student, you'll obviously get better information from your student housing office.  But in many cases, they'll simply point you to the web site of a local commercial apartment-finding service that has their rental listings online. They'll have names like HomeFinder.com, or ApartmentFinder.com in the Texas area (and parts of Georgia, Florida, and Illinois). It's important to check on the reputation of an apartment-finding web site, because that can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the locals have faith in a single apartment-listing site, then the apartment managers inevitable have to start to listing their rental units there, simply to get them to where they're going to be seen.

Unfortunately, there's not a one-size-fits-all solution for every city in America. But if you start with Craigslist and the web sites for the local newspaper, you're always going to see most of the rental units that are available, conveniently collected in one place!

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