Renting a Boston apartment sight-unseen can seem like a daunting endeavor. Nearly everyone will tell you to avoid a sight-unseen apartment renting scenario by all means necessary. The problem of renting sight unseen becomes even more acute when you look at history-filled cities such as Boston with a far greater percentage of older housing stock. However, what if you don’t have any other option? What if your circumstances put you in a position where a trip in advance is not going to happen?
Each year thousands of national and international students move to Boston. Many student find out they have been accepted to the university of their choice with incredibly short notice. Having rented over 100,000 college students in Greater Boston an apartment, we have seen all flavors mad scramble to secure last-second housing. It is often chaotic as best, but it doesn’t have to be, with proper highly concentrated planning.
Speed Dating For Apartments
The other scenario we see quite frequently is the working professional who just scored an incredible job in Boston and their company requires them here to promptly fill the role— fun times in Boston house hunting. Talk about speed dating your apartment. You are going to need an effective and efficient process.
One thing we do know is that we rent at least 10% of apartments in our portfolio sight-unseen. The incredible advance of smartphones with better cameras and video capabilities has certainly had an impact on our real estate showing process. Better technologies seemingly popping up daily helping to improve the speed and quality of virtual tours, facetime, videos, and pictures. We fully expect the number of virtual showings that help close leasing and sales transactions to continue to rise.
While signing a lease on your future apartment without seeing it in person might sound like a recipe for disaster or for potential scams, there are myriad ways to accomplish this endeavor without ending up disappointed or worse.
Here…