How did you find your rental in Arlington or Nova? (Alexandria: for sale, real estate)

[browns47]

Hi all -

First, apologies if this is a repeat question.

I am looking for advice on how to best find a place to rent somewhere in Arlington or Alexandria. We currently live in a one bedroom apt in Rosslyn and are looking for something slightly bigger, hopefully, in Crystal City, Fairlington, maybe old towne, but we are open to most options either on the Blue/yellow line, or a short bus ride to the Pentagon.

Does anyone have ideas for good resources to find rentals outside of the typical internet searches? I am well versed in Craigslist, The Washington Post, and Padmapper.com.

Ideally - we would like a condo type place with 2 bedrooms for around $2k a month. It's hard to find, but i know they are out there; just looking for suggestions on how to find them.

How did you find your rental? Did you use you the typical Craigslist route? Did a friend help? Did you use a realtor?

thanks for the help everyone!

[United_Caps_Skins_Fan]

For our current home we used a realtor. It took a while, but we found our realtor through some searching. Basically a call to one real estate company, led us on a journey through several, and eventually found our agent. Most places before that I have used Homes for Sale and Rent in DC, Maryland, Virginia | HomesDatabase.com there are some apartments on there, but more are home / condo listings. There are several sites like it as well. Find Real Estate, Homes for Sale & Houses for Rent on Realtor.com - Realtor.com® Zillow - Real Estate, Homes for Sale, Home Prices & Values Trulia - Real Estate, Homes for Sale, Sold Properties, Apartments for Rent

In our latest search we doubled our efforts by us doing searches along with our realtor. It did take a bit of time, but we found a place within a few months.

I would recommend starting out on the first website I listed and go from there. Short of that there is always craigslist or other such "classifieds" type places. The problem we ran into on CL is that somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the "ads" were scams. Where they wanted money / deposits...etc, up front via email, the phone or mail. CLEAR indications of scams. I was really surprised at just how many of them appeared to be scams. Basically scammers will look for places listed for sale and attempt to rent them. I have read many stories where people have showed up to look at a home, and either the home was already sold and had someone living it it, or the owner still lived in it while it was on the market.... things like that. In some cases some people were even gullible enough to send money up front, and come move in date either someone (usually an owner) was living there or the place was locked up and still on the market. In any case, just be very careful, especially when using any classifieds and / or CL. Hope this helps.

[mlv311]

You can also look in militarybyowner.com or work with a realtor. You wouldn't pay anything for the services, but it helps to work with someone who knows the area you want well.

[CaliTerp07]

I've found all 3 of my NoVA rentals on Craigslist--1 house share, 1 apartment, and one SFH.

[Jenjen391]

We used a realtor to find our rental in Fairlington.

[browns47]

Thanks for the help!

For those who use a realtor, were there any costs associated with it?

[Jenjen391]

Not for me. I think the management company or the landlord pays a sort of fee to the realtor who finds a tenant?

[CaliTerp07]

Originally Posted by browns47

Thanks for the help!

For those who use a realtor, were there any costs associated with it?

It's sort of a "passed along cost". We went out a few times with a realtor, but the prices were higher than what I was finding on CL. The landlord generally gives the realtor one month's rent as a finders fee, so the rent is higher to compensate for that. You don't directly pay the realtor though.