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Any decent New York City Apartment Guides?

I know new york has a huge amount of apartments, but the ones with websites seem few and far between. How do you find a ny apartment while you are out of town.

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1. www.craigslist.org. you have to understand, in many other cities and suburbs, apartment complexes are owned by big corporations that do a lot of marketing (such as through websites). it's not like that here. individuals own small buildings, and even when there's a large building and/or a large management company, there's enough demand for apartments that they don't generally need to advertise.
2. see your wrong in your first statement; New York DOESNT have a huge number of apartments. in fact, our vacancy rate is less than 1%! So please keep this in mind as its strictly a realtor's market in NYC and the prices are kept well into the category of expensive. however, cheaper places do exist if your willing to either do the leg work, be creative, or just end up using a broker. Doing the leg work will entail actually walking between apartment buildings and talking to supers to see if any are availible. You can also check out craisglist.org, rent.com, citihabitats.com, & nycdwellers.com to see what the going rate for what you want is. However these websites generally involve a broker which will charge you an extra 15% of the yearly lease as their commission along with first months rent and security deposit. (so you can see why finding no fee apartments is desired) There are things such as rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments out there, but finding them is usually random as they are quite coveted and typically passed down through families and friends. There is section 8, but i wouldnt recommend it as though the places they offer are newer stock, the neighborhoods they are located in can be sketchy. In my opinion, the Bronx is the cheapest place to rent, followed by Queens, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Manhattan. I dont't know your economic status, but unless you are quite wealthy, the only neighborhoods one can afford in Manhattan are all in upper manhattan (Harlem, Morningside Heights, El Barrio, Washington Heights, Inwood). Most of these neighborhoods are improving tremendously and pretty soon they too will be just as expensive as downtown. Hope this helps. Finding an apartment will require you here in town seeing the places and deciding right there because if you don't want it, someone else will take it moments later.
3. Here is agreat resource for finding apartment in New York City http://newyork.cityzero.net