Santa Rosa renters need perseverance, clever tips to land an apartment
One year after moving to Santa Rosa, Ann Pickering learned that the rent for her two-bedroom apartment was about to jump 10 percent, to $1,755 a month.
Rather than stay another year at the complex in Bennett Valley, Pickering this spring once more joined the throng of Sonoma County apartment seekers. Despite limited selection and loads of competition, she managed to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Larkfield. In so doing, she saved herself more than $250 a month compared to the new rent at her old unit.
Her secret? She used Craigslist email alerts to notify her whenever a new rental with her designated criteria became available.
“That really did turn out to be my best tip,” said Pickering, who does administrative work for a Santa Rosa engineering firm. Whenever a new alert popped up, “I could immediately view it and make an appointment.”
Finding rental housing in Sonoma County has been described as a challenge when things go well and an ordeal when they don’t.
Rent for the average county apartment has risen 45 percent in five years, hitting $1,746 at the end of March, according to Real Answers, a Novato company that tracks data from large rental complexes. The closest size to that average would be a two-bedroom, one-bath unit. The county’s occupancy rate has eased slightly, dipping to 95.4 percent for the year’s first quarter, compared to 97.2 percent a year earlier.
So what does it take to land a place you can afford here? Renters and other experts say success requires preparation, effort, flexibility and perseverance in the face of difficulties and rejection.
“Don’t give up hope,” said Jennielynn Holmes, director of shelter and housing for Catholic Charities in Santa Rosa. “There are rentals and there are people finding rentals.”
Over the past year, Catholic Charities helped nearly 600 people acquire rental housing, Holmes said.
Even so, rentals here typically are neither cheap nor easy to find.
“Property rents across the whole Bay Area are crazy, and Santa Rosa is no different,” said Andrew Woo, director of data science for Apartment List, a San Francisco-based rental listing website.
Santa Rosa property manager Keith Becker said, “The market is very competitive … so much so the city felt compelled to step in.”
Becker, the owner of DeDe’s Rentals, was referring to the 4-3 votes last month by the Santa Rosa City Council to design a rent control program and in the interim to limit rent increases to 3 percent for about 12,000 apartments.
The rising rents have affected a broad section of county residents. Four in 10 families here - more than 75,000 households - live in rented apartments or homes, according to U.S. Census estimates.
When contacted, several county renters voiced frustration with rising rents and the rental application process. Some expressed support for rent control and “just-cause eviction,” a process that limits the conditions under which tenants can be removed from a unit.
Nancy Schwab said she moved out of a Petaluma apartment complex last fall after the rent there jumped 28 percent. She said she eventually purchased a manufactured home in a west Santa Rosa mobile home park at a significant savings compared to what she would have paid for her old apartment.
If she hadn’t found her current home, she said, “I would not be in California.”
“It’s just a feeding frenzy,” Schwab said of the rental market. “It’s gotten to the point where everything is out of whack.”
Property managers and landlords insisted the solution to the current difficulty is to build more housing units rather than to place more regulations on landlords. Some suggested that too many rules have held back construction of both single-family homes and apartments, creating a situation where demand far exceeds supply.
West county property manager and landlord Karl Anderson said “it’s time to shift gears” and encourage the building of new housing projects.
For those in the hunt, the rental search involves at least three steps: finding the right place, making sure you can afford it and persuading a landlord to give you the keys.
Apartment List and other websites today offer rental listings and the ability to receive alerts when places become available. But by far the top search site named by apartment seekers and property managers was Craigslist.
Becker, whose DeDe’s Rentals oversees 500 units consisting of single-family homes and small apartment complexes, uses Craigslist. But he warned that apartment seekers can’t verify listings and the site is “still very much the Wild West.”
“Please be aware of the possible scams that are out there,” Becker said. No matter how incredible and enticing a story you may be told, he said, never send money directly to a so-called landlord who is promising in return to send you the keys to a rental.
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