And by special, I mean "a lot harder". I just went through finding an apartment myself (for the first time in eight years), so I have a great deal of sympathy for you. I am very choosy and I insist on getting a great place.
My advice, for what it's worth:
Put together your dossier now, not because you can't do it later, but it's easier to just scan it now and put it together in advance, and since you won't be presenting the documents in person when you see a place you like, it'll be way easier if you can e-mail a pre-arranged file in advance. In your case, I'd do this:
Prepare the rental application. (M.I.T. has a copy live. (http://web.mit.edu/afarrell/Public/apartment_application.pdf) A lot of places do, you can Google on various phrases in the application, if need be.) The standard Greater Boston Real Estate Board application is used by nearly everyone, since it's a legal application, but still as nosy as is allowed under the law. I used PDFPen (http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/index.html) to prepare mine.
Save the rental application as its own file. This would be your initial file to send off to interested listings.
Compile the following documents:
Letter verifying your employment in the United States and your length of time at that job. (If you're a student, get a letter from your school verifying full-time enrollment.)
Pay stubs.
Bank statements.
Credit history.
Arrange now for a guarantor, even if you think it unlikely you'll need one. It's easier to find someone now, and not need them after all, than to try to find someone when the real estate agents are advising you that it'll be about a half day before the apartment gets rented to someone else. Remind your guarantor that they'll want their credit report, and often a tax return, as well. N.B.: Your needing a guarantor may not have anything to do with your credit this time, more that you're currently residing outside the United States.
Do the rental application first, because it requires no more data than you can summon up yourself. I used a neighbour as the personal reference (as they can verify that I don't shoot guns at night or sell crack out the back door of my current house), a family member as the emergency contact, and NSTAR as my credit reference.
After you've gotten the rental application done, ask your employer for the employment verification letter and spend a little bit of time putting together all the data — credit report, bank statements, pay stubs, & c. — neatly. (I'd stick with the sort of crap you get with logos on it from those companies; normally I hate that kind of thing, but the idea is that it doesn't look like you PhotoShopped out the bad stuff, or just wrote it yourself.) And, of course, scan the letter from your employer. That way, you have a single large PDF file that you can send over for verification once it looks like someplace will move forward. (I choose PDF because everyone can read it. Microsoft Word files can look pretty funky once they're opened by someone new. You can generally do "print as PDF" or "export as PDF" from various files. On my Mac, it's an option from the printer dialogue in the rare programs that don't have it as an option from the File menu.)
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Renting from abroad is a special challenge.
Date: 2014-06-24 05:07 am (UTC)My advice, for what it's worth:
Put together your dossier now, not because you can't do it later, but it's easier to just scan it now and put it together in advance, and since you won't be presenting the documents in person when you see a place you like, it'll be way easier if you can e-mail a pre-arranged file in advance. In your case, I'd do this:
Do the rental application first, because it requires no more data than you can summon up yourself. I used a neighbour as the personal reference (as they can verify that I don't shoot guns at night or sell crack out the back door of my current house), a family member as the emergency contact, and NSTAR as my credit reference.
After you've gotten the rental application done, ask your employer for the employment verification letter and spend a little bit of time putting together all the data — credit report, bank statements, pay stubs, & c. — neatly. (I'd stick with the sort of crap you get with logos on it from those companies; normally I hate that kind of thing, but the idea is that it doesn't look like you PhotoShopped out the bad stuff, or just wrote it yourself.) And, of course, scan the letter from your employer. That way, you have a single large PDF file that you can send over for verification once it looks like someplace will move forward. (I choose PDF because everyone can read it. Microsoft Word files can look pretty funky once they're opened by someone new. You can generally do "print as PDF" or "export as PDF" from various files. On my Mac, it's an option from the printer dialogue in the rare programs that don't have it as an option from the File menu.)