I've been getting/seeing a lot of mixed suggestions, so I figured it'd be worth asking this sub.
My wife and I need to be in Chicago by the beginning of July. We've loosely honed in on River North based on a few factors, and, at least based on Zillow, we'd have a decent amount of options which meet our requirements.
So, the question now is: how do we actually approach this process optimally? We're planning on taking a trip to view apartments over a day or two, but it's unclear when we should we do this, how we coordinate the viewings, what we should be expecting in terms of upfront costs for applying, what we should be looking for/avoiding, etc.
My current plan is to just go through the apartments we've found on Zillow and contact all of them to try to plan this out, but I have no clue if that's a feasible approach especially with trying to schedule everything over a day or two. As an additional complication, I do need some time to plan the actual trip (including taking the time off of work and booking the flight and hotel), so there's a weird timing issue I'm trying to understand.
Additionally, I've been told by people who aren't familiar with the Chicago apartment market that we should wait until late May before even trying to contact anyone, but some posts in this sub makes it sound like that may be too late for a late June move-in date. As of now, I was planning on taking the trip around the week of May 25th, contacting landlords around the week of the 11th to figure out dates and book everything, and taking it from there. Does that sound reasonable?
I also considered contacting a rental agent, but it seems like that might limit our options considerably? In the past, I've only rented in the city I lived in or just winged it and rented a place online without even seeing it, so I never even considered an agent. But I'm trying to be a bit more careful considering how expensive these places are, how dense the city is, and how tight these timelines are.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Appreciate any advice anyone can provide, even if it's not specifically related to my questions lol