How to Find a Home or Apartment in a City You Don’t Live In

I began searching for an apartment in June, in much the same way I enter stores on Black Friday: steeling myself to join hordes of people all hyper-focused on their limited opportunity to snatch the same merchandise. But hunting for a home in a housing market with a critical lack of supply is worse than any mall sale. CNN reports that the US has a shortage of 2.3 million units, which makes apartment-searching an exhausting odyssey of scouring online listings, compromising with your spouse or roommate, and jumping to book tours for reasonably priced places. Granted, certain rental markets are more competitive than others, but if someone applies for a home hours before you in a major city like San Francisco, you may lose the unit.

My own search in New York City was further complicated by the fact that neither I nor my roommates lived near the city. I experienced it all: shady brokers trying to convince me to sign paperwork before seeing a unit, struggling to contact a roommate who was backpacking through Europe, and driving seven hours through thunderstorms with my mom to pack our weekends with tours. Parking was so scarce on these trips that my mom asked a shocked meter attendant, “How much is the fine to park illegally here?” However, once I started using technology to facilitate my out-of-state search, I secured a spacious apartment with a rent I can afford as a public school teacher. Here’s how I found a home from afar and (mostly) kept my sanity using free online tools.

List Your Priorities

Documenting priorities for a living space is necessary to ensure that you and your housemates understand each other. For me, a $1,800 monthly rent maximum was essential so I could pay my bills. Since my two roommates work from home, they requested windows with good sunlight, and we all preferred in-unit laundry. We recorded our requirements in a Google Sheet with four columns labeled Name, Needs, Deal-Breakers, and Wants. Then we listed bullet points in the rows to ensure that we only considered places that provided our essentials without deal-breakers. Feel free to make a copy of this template on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and share it with your partner or housemates to minimize misunderstandings. If you’ll be living alone, simply note your own preferences.

You can use the same spreadsheet to organize notes on prospective apartments. In another tab, my roommates and I created a table with a row for each home we visited. We cataloged each place’s listing link, address, monthly rent, lease start date, distance to public transportation, amenities, broker’s fee, broker contact info, and tour notes. This approach helped us centralize our information, weigh units against our wants and needs, and update Becca—my roommate in Europe who couldn’t attend the tours.

Ask your housemates to provide their work addresses on this sheet too. With that information, you can evaluate an apartment’s distance to the public transportation required for work commutes by setting the building as a starting location and workplaces as destinations on Google Maps. If you’re going to live in an area that requires a car for traveling, you can replace the “Distance to Public Transportation” column with “Distance to Work.”

Get Automated and Organized

When apartment-hunting out of state, you may have less time to consider available units than locals, so let tech do the heavy lifting. Setting real estate website alerts so that you receive immediate, hourly, daily, or weekly emails with homes that fit your requirements is a great way to discover places without toiling for hours. StreetEasy was my go-to in NYC; I specified my desired rent, neighborhoods, number of bedrooms, amenities, and lease start date when setting alerts to tailor them to my needs. Zillow and Compass are nationwide alternatives with similar email alert or save search functions. Trulia Rentals may be especially useful when assessing an area from a distance, as its What Locals Say feature lists residents’ assessments of a location’s safety, walkability, and even holiday spirit.

Although we were out of state, one of my roommates and I traveled to visit units when possible. Sharing a Google Calendar for apartment tours kept us informed. Creating events for scheduled tours, hyperlinking our spreadsheet in event descriptions, and adding notifications to the events reminded us to review notes in our sheet and follow up with each other about which places hardly resembled their pictures and which units were possibilities. You can use Microsoft Outlook Calendar’s shared calendar feature if you don’t love GCal, and Todoist is a great Android option, as free users can share projects with up to five people. Even if your roommate or partner lives outside the country, a shared calendar lets them view scheduled tours in their local time zone and easily identify those to attend virtually. When Becca was free, I FaceTimed her so she could see prospective…