The Apartment Hunt Part 2 - The Final Chapter?

Everyone knows that the New York City real estate market moves with the speed of a mountain cat. You have to be able to chase the cat’s tail in order to get what you want. To take the analogy one step further, you need to protect yourself from the cat’s sharp claws, and jagged, serrated teeth. The teeth and claws are the apartment rental application process. Treacherous.

The real estate broker is like a raccoon or a weasel, that could conceivably bite you, but doesn’t have much power to do any real damage. Unless of course, that broker is carrying the dangerous rabies virus. In that case, you’ll need to protect yourself from both the mountain cat’s teeth and claws, and the raccoon/weasel’s infectious bite.

Follow me so far? Good.

The best protection against any of these dangerous real estate analogies is a good, strong horse whip, and some sort of tough, thick leather gloves - the type that a falconer wears would work just fine.

Anyway, in the real world, the whip and the gloves are an analogy for a good, smart lawyer - or team of lawyers. Lucky for me, I happen to be renting an apartment with that pair of gloves and a whip. That’s right. Jaimi’s a lawyer. And a smart one at that.

When she wrote “Occupation: Attorney” on the rental application, it’s the same as writing “Don’t fuck with us. We will destroy you.” Although, admittedly, if you were to actually write that, your application would have a good chance of being rejected.

As expected, our application was approved in two flicks of a lamb’s tail - to borrow a commonly used farming expression.

Then it was time to review and sign the lease. Jaimi read it over, modified the lease to her liking, and sent the marked up version back to the management company.

The changes, apparently, were none too subtle:

1) Instead of us paying the rent to the management company, they will pay the rent to us.

2) Upon signing, we will not only own the apartment, but also own the people who currently live in the building - in perpetuity. Let me be clear, these are NOT indentured servants.

3) Fresh rose petals will cover all hallway floors leading from the elevators and stairwells to our apartment door.

4) The neighbor upstairs will pay for our internet, the neighbor downstairs will pay for our heat and hot water, and the neighbor in the adjacent apartment will pay for our newspaper.

5) No dogs allowed? Wrong. Dogs AND monkeys allowed and encouraged.

6) Our apartment will NOT be subject to state or federal laws and regulations pertaining to copyright and patent infringement. We WILL be able to produce high quality bootlegs of current first-run movies and sell them from an old card table set up in front of the building.


The list of changes went on from there to include a clause about installation of a Skee-ball lane in the basement, and a handball court on the roof.

Suffice it to say, the revisions were all rejected.

The original lease was happily signed by all parties involved. And as you may have guessed already - but for the benefit of those not familiar with smart ass-ery or sarcasm - the above changes merely existed in my imagination, and were never really proposed.

I’m not the lawyer, after all.

The point of all this, of course, is to let you know that we got an apartment. And it’s exactly the one we wanted, and I can’t wait to move in and decorate the place like a medieval castle.

The process went pretty smoothly - because they were scared of Jaimi’s mad lawyering skillz. We’re both excited for the big move at the end of March.

Updates to follow.