After arriving in the US, one thing you probably have to do is find an apartment. For the first couple of weeks after your arrival you will probably stay at a hotel or in an apartment from your employer; either way, you will need to find a place to stay and feel home at — the earlier the better.
I had a very nice place to stay when I arrived, and still, because I knew it was temporary I didn’t really feel at home. So finding an apartment was one of my top priorities.
A Good Location
Commute time can be huge in the US and the time to drive to work might easily double during rush hour. So being close to work was a key factor for me when looking for apartments. At previous visits I noticed that highway 101 is always really bad during rush hour whereas other highways like 280 encounter a lot less traffic. So I tried to stay away from 101 as fas as possible.
Check out Google Maps and plan your commute from a couple of potential areas using the option to plan the route for a specific time and day. Map your commute in the morning and in the evening, during times you usually would be on the road and on various days of the week.
Bedrooms
When looking at the number of rooms for an apartment in the US you get two numbers: the number of bedrooms and the number of baths. All places I checked out had the kitchen integrated into the living room. So a one bedroom / one bathroom apartment has a living room with a kitchen and usually a small walk-in closet in addition to the advertised rooms.
Size
As it is good form in the US to have strange units for everything, apartment size is measured in square feet. 1ft² = 0.09m² or very roughly 0.1m². I was looking for an apartment at around 70m² or 750ft².
Communities
In the Bay Area (or maybe all of the US?) communities are a very common thing. A community is usually owned and managed by a company. The other option would be to rent your apartment from a private landlord. I was looking for a community from the beginning so unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about the experience when renting an apartment from a private landlord.
Communities usually have a leasing office on-site where you can just walk in and ask for a tour. They often have a number of amenities, from BBQ areas and club houses over fitness studios to pools and roof top terraces. Especially in the newer places, the amenities are plentiful and you have a lot to choose from.
Some communities have more amenities than others but that does not necessarily mean they are more expensive, so check out everything you like, even if you think something looks ‘too expensive’.
Prices
‘Too expensive’ is a very interesting term when looking for an apartment in the Bay Area or in San Francisco. Even the cheapest apartments are more expensive than some very nice luxury houses in Germany.
For a single bedroom apartment a realistic price seems to be somewhat between 2700$ to 3400$ per month, at least at the time I was looking, in January 2019. Rent prices keep increasing, up to 10% a year from what I’ve heard, so keep that in mind when you read this post a couple of years later. Interestingly it does not matter too much whether the apartment is old but renovated or was build in recent years.
Another thing to keep in mind is that apartment prices are changing very often and are based on the duration of the lease agreement you want to sign. They also differ depending on the weekday and sometimes even the time of day you walk into the leasing office. The cheapest, above mentioned price for an apartment is usually for a 12 or 13 month lease and if you move in right away. If you only rent for a couple of month, prices can easily go up to 5000$ a month or higher, so plan ahead.
Hunting an Apartment
Back to how I found my apartment: I arrived in the US on a Friday evening, with my first work day being the next Monday. The most pressing thing was getting a social security number, but with the social security offices already closed this had to wait until Monday. So after a good dose of sleep I started looking for an apartment on Saturday morning.
In Germany I already had spent some time looking around on websites like apartments.com and bookmarked a couple of nice looking communities. I also directly checked the websites from Irvine and Prometheus, two big companies that own a lot of communities in the area, since I noticed that a lot of the apartments I bookmarked were owned by them.
I made a list of all the communities I was interested in and put together a route to stop by every one of them and then just went to each of their leasing offices to talk to the ambassadors there. You can just tell them what you are looking for (size, central or single a/c, heater, floors, etc.) and they will show you what they have available. You usually get a tour through the property so that you can look at all the amenities and through some apartments that fit your description.
I ended up finding a nice place in a building from 2017 in Santa Clara, only 6 minutes away from work or about 10 to 15 minutes during rush hour. It was in fact one of the first places I checked out. Even though I looked at a couple other places on Sunday, none really measured up to the first one. I moved in two weeks later.
My apartment is in a community owned by Prometheus and so far I am really happy with them. The Irvine communities I looked at all felt a bit older or were more expensive.
So far I am really happy with the place. If you happen to end up in a Prometheus apartment after reading this blog post, feel free to leave my name in the ‘recommended by’ field 😉