<p>We're getting ready to go see an apartment for S1 to rent for the upcoming school year. He is a transfer student, going in as a junior. The place we will be looking at is an apartment building, with all student housing - 2, 3 and 4-bedroom configurations. Each bedroom is a single, and there is a shared kitchen and living room. Some of the rooms have private bathrooms, and some are shared. We know the neighborhood is very safe, and it's less than 2 miles from the college.</p>
<p>Here is what we know:
Apartments are not furnished, but do include stove/oven and fridge.
Each student has their own lease.
Landlord has accounts for electricity, and will bill students accordingly.
We know the monthly fee for wireless internet.
A parent needs to sign as guarantor.</p>
<p>Here is our list of questions so far:
Are there fire/smoke/CO2 detectors? (If no, this is a deal-breaker)
Are there fire escapes for the 2nd floor rooms? (If no, this is also a deal-breaker)
How do residents contact landlord (or someone else) if something needs to be repaired, and how quickly can they expect a response?
Are there internet connections in rooms, or just wifi?
How much is, and where are hook-ups for, cable tv?</p>
<p>Please suggest other questions to ask, or things that might be red flags. What things would be deal-breakers for you and/or your (young adult) child?</p>
<p>I would add to your question: Are there fire/smoke/CO2 detectors?
Find out who is responsible for making sure they work. Are they hard wired into the building’s electric system or are they like the ones I have in my home (running on batteries). A girl from D’s school died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her off campus apartment. The building had CO2 monitors but they weren’t working. Not sure if someone removed the batteries or if no one checked them.</p>
<p>The other thing I would try to check out is to see if anyone has reported bedbugs at the location. </p>
<p>Lastly, I wasn’t clear on the payment arrangement – is your son sharing the monthly rent with a roommate (which therefore raises the possibility that the other party might not have the $ each month and you/your son will have to pick up the slack) or is your son’s lease paying for his own apartment?</p>
<p>What happens if a renter should leave? Would other roommates have any say about who could move in? In D1’s lease we stipulated that D1 had the right to find a new roommate, but the landlord could put someone there if D1 couldn’t get another roommate, the roommate had to be a female and a student of the university. D1 was sharing an apartment with a girlfriend, we didn’t want the the landlord to put a random guy in the apartment.</p>
<p>The biggest risk of renting an apartment with students is if one should leave in the middle of school year and stick other students with his share of rent. In your case, every student has their own lease, so this is not an issue.</p>
<p>Ask about parking. Is there guaranteed or adequate parking for all residents and is a parking pass required? What kind of visitor parking is available?</p>
<p>I bought the CO detector myself for DD’s on-campus apartment and would also buy a smoke detector. I would ask to read a sample lease.</p>
<p>The lease we (I signed it too) signed for my daughter’s apartment this year seemed to protect the landlord. It says that if one of the kids doesn’t pay, the other is responsible. It is not a lot, so I did not care. Hers also requires professional cleaning of the carpets at the end of the lease. I think that is good because I know they will have been professionally cleaned when she moves in.</p>
<p>DD is in a city, so the kids are now asking about bed bugs eeeeeewww as Class of 2015 mentioned. The lease does address multi-leg critters in general and the landlord gets to take care of them.</p>
<p>My daughter is also going to get internet and split it with the kids across the hall using wireless. She is going to skip cable becasue she watches very little TV.</p>
<p>In my experience, there are two kinds of off-campus housing: the kind where the roommates share the lease and the kind with individual leases.</p>
<p>My daughter lived in the first type of housing. She and her roommates were jointly responsible for their rent, utilities, and cable. If somebody didn’t pay, the other two would have had to do so (although such a situation was unthinkable, given the people involved, all of whom knew and trusted one another). When one roommate decided to move out at the end of the first year’s lease, the other two, both of whom wanted to stay for a second year, were responsible for finding a substitute. It was not necessary for all of the people sharing the apartment to be of the same gender (and in fact, they were not). </p>
<p>My son lived in the second type of housing. He and his roommates were each individually responsible for their rents, and utilities and cable were included. If somebody didn’t pay, the others were not responsible. If someone decided not to renew his lease at lease-renewal time, the remaining roommates had a limited amount of time (I think three weeks) in which to find a substitute, after which the landlord had the right to give the room to someone on the waiting list. All people living in the apartment had to be of the same gender (presumably because it would have been terribly awkward to place people from the waiting list if mixed-gender apartments were allowed).</p>
<p>It would be helpful to know which of these sorts of arrangements your kid is getting into.</p>
<p>It would also be helpful to see what you can find out from the grapevine (by which I mean the forum here for your kid’s school and apartment rating sites on the Internet, as well as more personal sources) about the landlord’s reputation. There are good property management companies and there are terrible ones. You hear about slumlords in college towns, but my daughter had an excellent experience with her property management company, which has a very good reputation. My son, on the other hand, had to deal with a lot of inexperienced and incompetent people who never seemed able to do anything right the first time.</p>
<p>Just a clarification the OP mentions CO2 but you are really talking about CO carbon monoxide. As of July 1 2011 California landlords are required by law to provide CO detectors.</p>
<p>You want fire escapes so that renters on the second floor can get out of the building if the primary and secondary exits are blocked. In our kids’ apartment, there are two bedrooms. If the fire is in the dining/living room blocking the way to the primary and secondary exits, one room has two additional exits (through windows) and the other bedroom has it’s own exit via a window to a roof and stairway. It also has another window but that would require a jump (or lowering via tied sheets) for one story.</p>
<p>You seem very relaxed about the fact that the apartment is more than a mile from the college, so I assume that your son has a car.</p>
<p>In addition to asking the landlord about parking, I think you also need to ask the college about parking. If your son will not be able to get a permit to park on campus, or if the number of spaces allotted to students is inadequate, then you need to be checking out public transportation options between the apartment building and the campus and/or bicycle storage arrangements at the apartment building if your son would consider commuting to campus by bicycle.</p>
<p>It’s not a good idea to assume that adequate parking will be available on campus. You need to find out. At one school my daughter visited, a student asked during the information session whether freshmen were allowed to have cars. The answer was “Sure. Have fun trying to find a place to park it. [Evil cackle.]”</p>
<p>A year from now my D will be the first member of our family to move into off-campus housing. This thread has been amazingly helpful–I hadn’t even thought of many of these issues. (Bookmarked!)</p>
<p>I’ll add that we own an apartment very close to a college campus. When the family that had lived there for many years vacated, we could have had our pick of students to fill the place, but ultimately chose a family. We worried about a lot of things–that one roommate would leave and we’d have a hard time collecting the shortfall in rent from the others; that the place wouldn’t be kept up or would be damaged; that loud parties would disturb the neighbors. Kids aren’t ideal tenants, so if a lease seems to “protect the landlord” it’s because landlords need to protect their property and their income. Ask your kids what their dorm hallways look like on Sunday mornings and how many students lose their damage deposits, and you might have a little pity for landlords!</p>
<p>I really like the arrangement that each person has their own lease.</p>
<p>The worm has had good and bad experiences. The worst was with someone who immediately began to have females staying over. Son raised the question of spliiting rent 3-ways. This rm/mt also began to smoke in apt. Feeling shut out of bathroom and kitchen is an awful way to live. While other experiences have been positive, I bring up this negative so that the OP can talk to son about how he would handle such situations.</p>
<p>Check the housing website for his U. There is most likely info about off campus housing options and what to look for. I know that in Madison, WI there are all sorts of city rules/regulations landlords must follow. Get a copy of tenants rights for the city his apt will be in. Consider checking the UW-Madison website for their info to get ideas.</p>
<p>Campus area landlords had all sorts of addendas to the standard rental form used. These were good from our (parent) viewpoint- things about noise, no kegs…</p>
<p>Ask about the security deposit and how to determine son’s share if there are damages et al.</p>
<p>What needs to be done to get a new lock cylinder and new keys? Given that you don’t know who has had keys to the unit previously, I see this as a safety issue. The landlord/manager obviously has some rights to a working key, but I’d like to be assured that the other 30 keys hanging out there for the unit are no longer usable. This is something I’d be happy to pay for. The front door should have a deadbolt, but it should not require a key to exit, imo – if there is an emergency, you want to be able to get out quickly without fumbling for keys. (Some places don’t allow them anyway, but others do.) </p>
<p>The other thing I’d want checked is whether the egress routes – like windows – are all in operable condition, and if there are windows, that there is an ability to lock them securely. If there are bars on the windows, test that they can be released from the inside – this is something the student should try before it is needed. </p>
<p>As a (former) landlord, I’m also all in favor of taking a bunch of pictures before move-in that clearly show the state of the unit. If there’s a bad stain on the carpet before move-in, or a hole in the drywall, or a cracked window, so much better to capture that image before you move in than arguing about whether it should be deducted from your damage deposit when you depart.</p>
<p>My daughter’s college had online ratings of the area rental properties and landlords so do a search to see if this exists. She didnt find it until after she had signed the lease and moved in to discover the place had a very bad rodent problem that the landlord wasnt willing to do anything about. It was in several of the online comments and had she known she would have not rented there.</p>
<p>DD’s new apartment is in a city on the ground floor. She does have bars on the windows and I had not thought about the fire risk. Someone mentioned inside releases for bars. What good would that do if someone can break the outside window and reach in to release the bars? anybody have any experience with bars on the inside?</p>
<p>I will need to make sure she has escape routes…</p>
<p>I would think that the bars would be on the outside; not the inside.</p>
<p>I imagine that a burglar would just move on when seeing bars on windows. They wouldn’t know if there was a release on the inside or not and why waste the time (and potentially getting caught), if the chances of a reward are not good.</p>
<p>The first thing I would be concerned about, the main thing, under any circumstances, would be personal safety- who patrols that area and who responds to an emergency call? At my kid’s college, the school owns several additional buildings. It’s also a “safe” neighborhood, but the school’s security routinely drives the area to identify any loiterers, make sure main doors are closed and building security systems are operational. (City cops also patrol, but focus on the neigborhood, not individual buildings.) The kids can call campus security first, if they have a concern and it doesn’t need local police, rescue or fire. At some schools, campus security will do this for non-school owned buildings, if a number of their students live there and it’s within some specified distance from the campus.</p>
<p>The individual leases OP mentioned should mean that if one roommate leaves, the others have contracted only for their portion of the rent and related expenses.</p>