AM Linkage: Yup, There Was an Earthquake This Morning; Muni Shelter Naughtiness; Happy Birthday, Balboa Theater; More!

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CurbedWire: Foreclosures En Route to Rentals; Pinterest and Shelter Media

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, February 27, 2012, by Sarah Firshein

Photo by Pearce_Pics/Curbed National Flickr pool

NATIONWIDE—It's happening: the process to convert foreclosed properties into viable rentals, that is. Fannie Mae has plans to sell off 2,500 homes throughout L.A., Riverside, Calif., Southeast Florida, Vegas, and more. [WSJ]

THE INTERNET—Looks like newish social media site Pinterest is for more than just making fun of Mitt Romney's penchant for luxury hotels: a bunch of national magazines, including Elle Decor, Country Living, and House Beautiful, report it drives a massive amount of traffic to their respective websites. [previously; Fishbowl NY]

THE INTERNET—It's that time again for Apartment Therapy's Homies awards, honoring home and design blogs. Head over to vote. [Apartment Therapy]

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Abby's Seeking Shelter: On the Hunt: How To Prepare Yourself For the Perfect Rental

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Tuesday, December 6, 2011, by Abby Pontzer

At this very moment, Curbed's very own Abby Pontzer is on the hunt for an apartment in San Francisco. As any current apartment-seeking SFian knows, it's more difficult than ever to score a lease in the city right now. With that, we're pleased as punch to announce that Abby will be sharing her stories of hope, failure and useful information to help guide you along the path of San Francisco's rental scene. Have a hot tip or question for Abby? Feel free to drop her a line.
[Image via Shutterstock]

The time has come, my dears, to find a new apartment. Turns out I'm not alone. At all. Stories are all over the SF blogs about how vacancies are at their lowest rates, and landlords are taking in thousands of dollars in application fees at each showing.

I'm currently living in the Lower Haight, in a top floor one bedroom I started renting for $1,568 in January 2009. Those were different times, my friends. While that application process was competitive, it was "You're the top choice out of six," not sixty, candidates. I have often joked over the past two years that I would die in this apartment I love it so much, but a wrench has been thrown into those plans. My boyfriend and I have decided to co-habitate, and my landlord is not allowing it. He'll likely be able to charge at least 50% more once I'm out of there. So there you go. If I'm giving up my apartment, it must be love.

Here's what you'll find in columns to come: tips for organizing your apartment search, what to do (and not!) at open houses, what listings say vs. how the apartment shows. I'll also cover a few of the listings I see so you can avoid dogs or get after some great ones, though I probably won't post an apartment if I'm applying for it myself. I hope, at some point, you'll also find a success story from yours truly.

Step One: What are your dealbreakers and your price range?
You've decided on moving, but don't go shopping around just yet. Looking at apartments that don't fit your needs almost always ends up in disappointment. You need to figure out three things: where you want to live, what you can afford to spend, and what's most important to you in a new place.

To a lot of people, where you live in San Francisco explains who you are. There are stereotypes for every neighborhood and microhood, true or not. I've lived in SOMA, Pac Heights, and the Lower Haight, and there are still so many neighborhoods around the city that I love, like the Inner Sunset or Glen Park. We are looking in the Mission (but including parts of Noe Valley, The Castro, La Lengua, and Bernal Heights). Part of the reason for the Mission is personal style, part is having easy access to the highway for getting to the south bay, but we've settled on an area and now we need to be pretty narrow-minded in our search.

As far as price range goes, most landlords or property management companies will require you have at least three times the rent in gross monthly income. For example, if you make $60,000 per year, your max would be $1,666. I personally would be uncomfortable spending one third of my gross income on rent, but it's a minimum requirement for a lot of rentals, so do the math to figure out what your upper boundary is.

Next, decide what you care about most in an apartment. We started by making a list of everything we could ever ask for, and then prioritized the top 3-4 things. Our “must needs” are: laundry (at least in the building), parking, and a quiet bedroom. Our list of nice to haves is much longer and includes things like hardwood floors, a dishwasher, outdoor space, or being on the top floor. The approach here, and I'm learning this myself as I go along, is that if these are truly your deal-breakers, you do not look at anything that doesn't satisfy them. Even in a competitive rental market, you can really wear yourself out going to too many open houses that don't meet your basic needs. Here are some that I looked at, and while great rentals, didn't even meet my basic checklist. I had let lowered expectations and pretty listing pictures get the best of me and I wasted my time. Both are firmly planted in Noe Valley, which shows how well I'm doing at finding apartments in the Mission to even look at.

This one bedroom in Noe Valley is on Castro and 24th for $2,450 had great hardwood, tons of closets, but no parking and no laundry. What was I thinking wasting my time with this? It was really cute though, and I would recommend it for people who don't need parking. The bedroom had great light but was on Castro, so there goes another dealbreaker with the 24-Divisadero going by at all times.

Another great apartment that didn't fulfill my “must have” list was on 24th and Noe for $2,600. I walked into the kitchen and wanted to live there, but again, no parking, and no laundry. Without my list of dealbreakers, I might have been wooed by the streaming light coming in over the accessible rooftop into the kitchen. I would have signed a lease that didn't meet our needs.

Of course, I've seen apartments that checked every box, but didn't feel like home to me. That's a must have that you can't fake, and is harder to tell from a posting. What do you think, dear readers? What are your absolute deal breakers when it comes to looking for a new apartment?
· S.F. Apartment Vacancy About as Low as During Dot-Com Era [SF Appeal]
· In Apartment Hunt, Looking Isn’t Free [Bay Citizen/NYTimes]
· Tenant Troubles: My Landlord Won't Let My Boyfriend Move In [SF Appeal]
· Tech and the San Francisco Rental Bubble [NYTimes]
· San Francisco: Vacation Rentals On the Rise [Curbed SF]

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Adweek's Hot List Nominees: Meanwhile, the shelter titles nominated for...

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Thursday, October 6, 2011, by Sarah Firshein

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Digital Age: Dwell is the only shelter representative...

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Best Roommate Ever Seeks Shelter: With SF rent prices sky-high as...

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, August 22, 2011, by Sally Kuchar

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The Printed Page: Top Ten Jabs in the Times' Online Shelter Magazine Story

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Thursday, June 2, 2011, by Sarah Firshein

Today the New York Times runs a truly epic story about the state of digital shelter magazines. (So epic, in fact, that it contains roughly 2,700 words over four pages online—countless column inches, no doubt, in the print edition.) As we've said before, Lonny is the grand doyenne of this crowd—its 2009 hatch to life has since inspired a notable stable of copycats: Rue, High Gloss, and Matchbook, among them. Fascinating things are learned about the kind of photoshoots these pubs organize, their budget, and, of course, the amount of traffic each site receives. (The key to the fountain of youth an absurd number of pageviews is being what's essentially a 347-page flipbook, just like Trad Home.) Interviewing these girls—as congenial as a luncheon on Sex and the City, right? Let's just say that it's a good thing the new-to-town (and decidedly un-girly) online design magazine Entra is sitting this one out. Here now, the top 10 jabs, from both the reporter and from the interviewees:

10: On the lack of an ad/edit page ratio: And the freedom from printing costs can result in excess, as when Lonny devoted 38 pages to a home in Chiswick, England.

9: On making friends with Lonny: “We didn’t have a pre-existing relationship with them and haven’t been able to develop one,” [Rue editor in chief] Ms. Gentilello said.

8: On recycling content: Even the articles can feel oddly familiar: after Lonny featured the Manhattan decorator Vicente Wolf, he turned up in Rue’s first issue last fall.

7: On editorial judgment: And aside from the 22 pages that Rue devoted to him [Wolf], there was the added bonus of being referred to as a "design god" whose wrinkles “only increase his masculine beauty.”

6: On digital media: As Crystal Gentilello, the 28-year-old co-founder and editor of Rue, put it, “Everyone and their mother has a blog.”

5: On writing skills: High Gloss seems willing to introduce almost anyone as a “style maven,” and Matchbook’s recent “Portrait of a Lady” article on Diana, Princess of Wales, reads like a Wikipedia entry.

4: On gaining experience in the industry: “I think she [Adams] still has to learn a lot,” Ms. Simpson [her former boss at Domino] said. “She went from an assistant to running her own magazine. She skipped a lot of steps along the way.”

3: On editorial judgment, again: While the editors of Rue might run an article called “Darko Weirdo Dinner Party,” as they did in their March/April issue, Ms. Adams’s taste is more traditional, and old-line society decorators like Albert Hadley have appeared in the magazine.

2: On the market being flooded: Ms. Adams rarely mentions her competitors, and when she does it’s with barely contained annoyance. “All of our competition is using it right now, and no one knew it existed before,” she said of Issuu. “It’s sort of like, ‘Oh, really, guys?’ ”

1: On what sets Lonny apart: “A lot of our competitors seem interested in fame,” Ms. Adams said. “We’re interested in decorating.”

· The Thriving (Online) Shelter Magazine Industry [NYT]
· The Online-Only "Print" Pub Catfight: Rue Vs. Lonny [Curbed National]
· Please Welcome the World's First Non-Girly Digital Design Pub [Curbed National]

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The Printed Page: Today is shelter pub launch day...

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Wednesday, April 13, 2011, by Sally Kuchar

Today is shelter pub launch day over on Curbed National; they're taking a look at Trad Home, the younger, cooler, 347-page digital cousin of Traditional Home, and all the examples of the high life in the New York Observer's Spring 2011 Observer Home supplementary mag. Click over for details. [Curbed National]

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The Printed Page: Dwell the Most-Followed Shelter Magazine on Twitter, Of Course!

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Tuesday, February 1, 2011, by Sarah

Folio has just released a list of the top 50 most-followed magazine brands on Twitter—People obviously ranks No. 1. Just when the cold absence of shelter magazines starts sinking in—wait!—there's Dwell, clocking in proudly at No. 35. As we've established before, things like spartan prefab housing outside Zurich or a sliced-open bunker in Holland are among the brightest spots in our days. Kudos to our lovable San Franciscan cousins for their social media knowhow.

· The Most-Followed Magazines on Twitter [Folio]
· Ten ItemsDwell Positively Cherishes [Curbed National]
· @Dwell [Twitter
· All Dwell coverage [Curbed National]

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