How to rent a house in the Bay Area

My partner and I have been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 3 years now. When we first decided to move in together I was living in group house I had found on Craigslist. We had another couple interested in living with us so we decided to go find a house we could rent together. Thus began our journey of fighting the Bay Area rental market. Hopefully our learnings will be able to help you find your next house to rent.

Be qualified

This is a pretty solid pre-requisite, and I don’t think there is too much to say here. Owners who are renting out a house really just want to the sure the rent check will arrive every month. That’s why they do credit checks and have minimum income requirements. If you can’t show gross income that is three times or more the rental amount then you should really look for a different property.

Be first

We started looking probably 5 weeks before we had to move out. This involved spreadsheets keeping track of different houses, scheduling visits and open houses, and a mad dash every weekend to visit as many houses as we could. The first weekend we found a house that would’ve been great and we were super excited. We went to the open house, took home a rental application, filled it out that day, and brought back. We talked with the owners, and then a few days later found out that they chose someone else to rent to. We had a similar experience the next weekend, so by the third weekend we started lowering our standards, and basically filling out a rental application at every house that was “good enough”, even if we weren’t excited about the house. Still we made no progress. It felt like such a brutal market; every open house had a half-dozen couples or groups visiting and filling out applications. How were we supposed to compete with those numbers?

The next weekend I saw a posting that looked great. Awesome location, close to friends, and a beautiful fish pond in the back yard. They were hosting an open house from 2pm-4pm on Saturday. I called the number on the listing and asked if we could come by at noon. And that was it! We were able to have some relaxed time with the owners, tell them about us, learn about them and really make them feel comfortable with us. They still hosted their open house but now every prospective tenant was being compared to us! We moved in at the end of the month.

After we moved out of that house and were looking for something a little bit bigger with a better commute, we learned from our experience the first time around. In one weekend of committed looking we had offers from three houses for us to choose from. Two of them we scheduled a viewing before the open house was going to start, just like the previous time. For the third house I had set up a Craigslist alert to email me whenever a new house matching my search appeared. I got one of these notifications while we were already out looking at houses, I called the landlord and we were in his house looking at the property within an hour of his posting going up. This is the house we’re living in now.

Be prepared

There is one more aspect to being first, and that’s what you bring. Just about every owner, landlord, agent, or property management company will tell you the same thing when you express interest in a house. “Fill out this rental application and send it back with an application fee.” The application fee covers a background check and a credit check that they run.

Remember that first house with the fish pond? By that weekend we were pretty sick of filling out application after application, taking a picture and emailing it in. So we took a shortcut. We found a rental application form that was pretty generic for the state of California, filled it out and just made photocopies. We each filled out our own form and included a few extra things that landlords were asking for: copies of recent pay stubs, our credit scores, and our IDs. Now we met that landlord and when we wanted to express interest in the house we were able to just hand them these completed application packets with all our information. The landlords have now met us, before meeting any other prospective tenants; and they know we have good credit and enough income to comfortably cover rent. They didn’t even charge us an application fee since we provided our credit scores. In addition they were really impressed with our commitment and level of organization. These are things that landlords like.

This experience motivated me to build rentshape.com. It’s a free online rental application form. After filling out the form you get a private link you can share with landlords, or you can print a formatted form and provide a physical copy to potential landlords.

Three things

In the end, getting a house to rent takes three things:

• Be qualified
• Be first
• Be prepared

When you show up with an application you also want to provide a copies of a recent pay stub, your credit score, and your ID. Hopefully this will help some of you with your house search and you’ll find a great next place to live.

Happy house hunting!