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New York's Largest Source of No Broker Fee Apartments! New York City Apartments, Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, Bronx & Westchester No Fee Apartment Rentals
A Pair of Out-of-Towners Find a Home in New York
TRISH HALL
06/04/00 |
In these days of scarce rentals and high prices, it is natural to assume that young and charming naifs from out of town will get trampled by New York's Darwinian real estate system.
Well, forget that assumption. Jeremy Harger and Tyra Hillsten, both now 26, met as high school students in Albany, Ore., and went on to Westmont College together, in Santa Barbara, Calif. They married at the end of their junior year and, after graduation, moved to Portland and took jobs, he in graphic design and she in marketing. Neither had lived anywhere but the West Coast. Neither had ever been to New York, not even once.
Yet somehow, without the assistance of relatives or friends, or of powerful mentors with rent-stabilized apartments to dangle, they found a very large and sunny one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side with a view of the Hudson River, in a pleasant doorman building on West End Avenue near 98th Street. The rent is $2,270 a month, which in this market makes it almost a bargain. Like the church they are now attending, and like the large wire cage that is home to their two rabbits, they found it through an Internet site.
There were, of course, the obligatory miserable experiences and frustrating detours along the way. When Mr. Harger and Ms. Hillsten moved here last year Mr. Harger's employer, Cole & Haan, a division of Nike, set them up with a real estate broker who was supposed to get them settled.
They weren't impressed. The broker would show them places they liked, and then admit that the rent was way over their budget. "He wasn't very helpful," Mr. Harger said. And they were mystified by his behavior.
"After he showed us apartments, he would just leave us," Mr. Harger said. They would be on a street corner, not knowing where they were, surprised that the broker had just darted off without returning them to their temporary home in Gramercy Park, supplied by Cole & Haan."
Finally the broker found them a "little dive" on the Upper East Side, Mr. Harger said, for $2,200 a month. But they were desperate, and were considering it, even though, Ms. Hillsten said, "it was the grossest thing I had ever seen; the guy hadn't cleaned his apartment since he moved in in 1990.
When they went home that night, "we were both feeling sick," Mr. Harger said. In a final try, surfing the Web, they found a site for the Landings, an apartment complex across the Hudson from Manhattan, in West New York, NJ, where they could have a large one-bedroom apartment for $1,800 a month, along with a fitness center and no buildup of dirt from years of previous tenants. Many of the development's residents take the nearby ferry for the commute to Manhattan.
And so they signed a seven-month lease. "It was a great apartment complex," Ms. Hillsten said. "And it was very romantic in the fall," riding the ferry from New Jersey to New York. But the charm faded over time, as the water grew colder and they were less entranced by the process of rushing to buses and subways in Manhattan to meet the ferry schedule.
"We weren't really experiencing the city," Mr. Harger said. "We were going home exhausted every night." Living there, Ms. Hillsten said, was a big barrier to friendships with people they were meeting in Manhattan.
ONCE Ms. Hillsten found a job, she now works as an assistant account executive for the Jordan McGrath Case & Partners advertising agency, they knew that they could afford more, and that it was time to try Manhattan once again. "We're like, no brokers," Ms. Hillsten said.
They looked at newspaper ads, and noticed one for an apartment being rented by Rent-Direct.com. They logged onto the company's site and found that for a fee of $169, users get access to the company's listings until they find an apartment. The company says it provides listings from more than 325 landlords in Manhattan. It also e-mails customers with newly arriving apartments that meet their needs, and shows plans and photos that make it easy to look without leaving home.
Within two weeks, the couple had found the place at 777 West End Avenue. In March, they moved into the apartment, with its long, roomy kitchen, very big dining area, large living room with that river view, and large bedroom.
In one corner of the living room is Mr. Harger's small sculpture of a sumo wrestler; on the walls are some copies he made of works by van Gogh, his favorite painter. Although there is a striking red rug and a big green couch, the rabbits, Lily and Sydney, seductively soft and floppy, become the stars. They lounge about on the rug, like dogs, using a litter box when necessary; on good days, they are treated to cocoa pebbles.
Or they use their large cage that sits against a living room wall. "We spent an extra $100 to give them a three-level condo," Ms. Hillsten said. But they needn't have bothered with the top floor. "It turns out they have a fear of heights," she said.
Before the couple moved to New York, the rabbits had their own bedroom, one of the three in the suburban Portland house that Mr. Harger and Ms. Hillsten built two years after they were married.
Ms. Hillsten was not eager to leave. She loved working in the yard of her 1,600-square-foot house, with its mortgage payments of $1,200 a month. "I'd go out with scissors and cut herbs," she said. Just as her husband was offered the new position in New York, she was promoted to sales rep at her company.
As her husband was having discussions about the job, "I was dragging my feet most of the way," she said. "For me, Portland was perfect. You have Mount Hood, and the beautiful river."
But living in Manhattan, she said, has changed her feelings. She likes being close to all the stores she needs. "I've always lived in a city or a suburb where you drive 10 minutes for everything," Ms. Hillsten said. She likes Central Park, where she runs; he likes the architecture, and the pizza.
They sold their car a few weeks ago; it was too expensive, they said, and they didn't need it. They've been trying Indian food, "all those new flavors I had never experienced before," Mr. Harger said. And like all newcomers to the Upper West Side who like to cook, the discovery of the Fairway market was an important moment.
Now they are living the fantasy that Mr. Harger had back in Oregon, when his image of New York came from scenes in "You've Got Mail," which on their DVD version also gives maps and photos of Upper West Side institutions like Riverside Park and H & H Bagel.
New York life is more expensive, though, and they have been forced to go back to a budget, as in their early married days. "Jeremy says I should think of it as graduate school," Ms. Hillsten said. And like all good graduate students, she has a few herbs on her window sill, a reminder of a past garden, or a harbinger of a future one.
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Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission.
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