Since I recently had to find a new place to call home I can tell you a little about my experience in finding an apartment/condo. I was ready to live on my own (I’ve had roommates my whole life, from brothers and sisters to friends) and wasn’t ready to make the jump to buying a house. So many choices for where to live. A favorite site became Craigslist, but after being initially turned off by the process of finding roommates on Craigslist I tried to explore all the options of looking for housing in Charlottesville.
Off Campus Partners is the place to visit if you are a student looking to rent. Their site allows you to write on the forums to find other people looking for roommates and buy/sell furniture on the forum. Off Campus Partners was started by a UVA student and has expanded to other universities. The site allows you to email the landlord of a place you’d like to rent directly from the site. Students can also use the site to sublet if they end up studying abroad or going home for the summer.
Blue Ridge Apartment Council is helpful for professionals looking for housing. I think the site has one of the more comprehensive Charlottesville apartment searches. I also checked out Apartment Finder. The Blue Ridge Apartment Council was able to find 211 properties that met my search criteria compared to only 11 with Apartment Finder. I also liked that the Blue Ridge Apartment Council let me know which apartment complexes were already at maximum capacity so that I didn’t waste time driving around to ones that didn’t have any availability.
