A few months ago, my landlord had priced me out of my then-current digs. I'd already gone apartment-hunting four times in not even as many years in New York. I dreaded the prospect of another go-round, and Craigslist and StreetEasy felt less fruitful than ever. So, in an act of "creative desperation", I created a tiny web-app I called Help Jeremy Find an Apartment.
Through the app, I set a bounty on my search, asking friends to leave tips about apartments or tips about people who might know about apartments, in return for the prospect of a cash reward. If I found an apartment this way, I'd give $60 to the person who referred me to it, $30 to the person who referred that person, and $10 the person who referred that person. I could have tried organizing the whole ordeal via email, but the app made tracking these referrals much easier.
Did the experiment work? In some ways, yes: Through the app, I heard about apartments that I'd otherwise never have found. Someone I've never met submitted the following tip: "I saw someone just move out of my building at [redacted] 69th Street in Woodside, Queens," along with details. A friend of another person I'd never met shared a listing she'd found through a private Facebook group. Friends pointed me to realtor-listed apartments that hadn't been cross-posted to Craigslist.
In other ways, the experiment failed: None of the apartments I found about were quite right. The studios in my price range felt just a bit too far from my closest friends' apartments. A couple of studios seemed well-placed and well-priced but were still undergoing renovations, and I didn't trust the brokers' optimistic timelines. Some other tips seemed promising, but fell through.
In the end, I resorted to my backup plan, which I'd heard about through old-fashioned word of mouth a week before I launched "Help Jeremy Find an Apartment": a two-bedroom apartment in Carroll Gardens, shared with a friend-of-a-friend. That's one more roommate than I'd planned on having, but the apartment is on a tree-stuffed block, with a real kitchen and living/dining room, at two-thirds the price of most the studios I'd seen. Even though she told me about the apartment before the experiment began, I'm giving the connecting friend $60, and donating the other $40 to charity.