Apartment hunting in Charlotte: A choice between “posh” or “luxurious with a country club flair”
My wife and I are moving to Charlotte after several years in our nation’s capital.
She was born and raised in the Queen City and her family still lives there. Charlotte is fun and on the upswing, and also much cheaper than D.C.
But where to start? The Apartments.com listing for Charlotte has a ton of places to rent and it was hard to know where to start.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time visiting Charlotte, but I didn’t really know a Cotswold from a NoDa. I did know that Pinky’s doesn’t make apartments out of their pimento cheese fries, both understandable and disappointing, so that meant our first choice was out of the question.
I checked out Yelp, but that wasn’t much help. Most places have fewer than 10 reviews. The ones that do have a few four-star reviews followed by two-star reviews.
Complicating this process is our six-year-old Siberian husky Kodiak, so we had to cross off all of the places that don’t accept dogs. To further cut the list, some places have Siberians on their breed restriction lists. Here’s a video of her playing in the snow.
A video posted by Clayton (@mrhanson3) on Feb 20, 2015 at 2:59pm PST
When I checked the dog box in the Apartments.com Pet-Friendly category, the list was cut to a still-unmanageable 5,102.
Some of the fees were outrageous. I’m not exactly sure what admin fees are, but I do know that they range from $150 to $350 (!). That doesn’t include the application fee ranging from $60 to $100.
The descriptions of the apartments weren’t much help. A lot of apartments were described as “posh,””trendy,” or “luxurious with country club flair.”
The pictures ranged from helpful to odd. For example, who is this chap? Is he the butler? I didn’t expect to see a stock photo of a cool dude.
I assume this next picture means you can get into an illegal poker game any night of the week at this apartment.
We didn’t want to live Uptown, but we also didn’t want to live too far away from the city. We chose to live on the south side of Uptown because my brother-in-law and my wife’s parents live on that side of town. So we applied to a few places and since all things were pretty much equal, we went with the one that had the best customer service.
So where we did end up? As my brother-in-law put it, “You’re basically between Plaza Midwood, for when you want to feel 30 and fun, and South Park, for when you want to feel 40 and flush with cash.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2015 at 1:26 AM with the headline "Apartment hunting in Charlotte: A choice between “posh” or “luxurious with a country club flair”."