18. Two ways to approach apartment hunting
Leading up to May, my girlfriend and I looked at many different apartments together. This process — or doing this process together, rather — wasn’t a “problem” like some of my other posts. But it brought out some interesting patterns in how we make decisions.
If I could sum up how people choose apartments, it’s along two vectors:
Strictness of criteria
Pattern vs instance
Strictness of criteria
I’m much pickier than my girlfriend (and I’ve always been this way). I have strong opinions on if a building is too close to the street, or if it’s one block down from the ideal location. I care a lot about if the windows are full floor to ceiling vs just 4 or 5 feet. I care about the style of handle on the kitchen cabinets.
It’s not that P doesn’t care about any of these things, but her perspective is different. She takes this approach: look at X number of apartments, and assuming there are a few that meet the base criteria, pick the best one and move in. She’s more pragmatic than me (in many domains).
In our case, this difference wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t an issue because I, as the more picky partner, was willing to look at new apartments every day for weeks. Then, I could bring the ones that met my higher criteria to her and she would likely accept. This is exactly how we found the apartment we chose.
It would cause problems if I didn’t love to look at new apartments. If I, as the pickier partner, was just shooting down her ideas and not finding new ones, it comes across as lazy and dismissive.
Pattern vs instance
Another area of frustration in our search was how her criteria changed. Well, rather, my perception of her criteria changed.
We began the process listing out our most important criteria. While many of our locations preferences were different, two neighborhoods overlapped. Our budgets were similar.
As we toured our first apartments, I paid attention to the things I liked and didn’t like, and the things she liked and didn’t like. We both agreed quite quickly that having laundry inside the unit was a requirement (and not easy to find in our desired neighborhoods).
But where I got tripped up was when we toured an apartment and her criteria seemed to have change. If she liked having two bedrooms in the last one, why was she excited about a one bedroom that costs more? I got confused why she was sending me apartment listings outside of our agreed-upon neighborhoods (at first it actually excited me as I liked the other neighborhoods, but still).
The differences I noticed were just differences in approach. In my head, it made the most sense to set the criteria first and evaluate each apartment based on that criteria. We want two bedrooms? Then every one bedroom has a BIG knock against it.
She took a different approach. She had her standards — parking, for example — but she evaluated each home for all of it’s features and drawbacks together. The fact that a benefit of the last one was two bedrooms didn’t matter. This one had a nice kitchen, was steps to a park, and met all of our other “must have” criteria. For her it was like comparing apples and penguins.
For me, it felt like she was changing her criteria all of the time. But to her, the patterns between the apartments that I was getting hung up on were made up anyway, and each apartment should be judged on its own merit. There’s no right answer here. And a right answer doesn’t matter anyway as P and I found a spot we are both super excited about.