I’m trying to find housing in Ann Arbor for this fall. I still have the old mindset that I’m going to show up in a campus town a couple of weeks before september move-in and find something decent. No sir. In real-estate-squeezed Ann Arbor you’re really supposed to do this 7-8 months ahead of time and I’m actually playing catch up working on it in spring.

Another difference in the modern real estate market: I can actually do a suprising amount of room-shopping in Michigan from my chair in British Columbia. The postings go up on craigslist, my RSS reader alerts me when there is something new during the day, frequently there are pictures, I send an email and am probably talking to the renters within a day or so. One of the places I am looking at had videos of all the rooms. Thanks to Google Maps I can quickly get a feel for where the houses are relative to campus and downtown and such.

One still-ungoogleable knowledge is the character of the neighbourhood the houses are in. That still requires first-hand knowledge. Sergey? Larry?

Here’s an interesting posting:

$435 – nice upstairs room in arthur miller’s old house on state

Who wouldn’t want to live in Arthur Miller’s old place?