For those fortunate enough to have avoided suffering the indignity of looking for an apartment in and around Washington, D.C. in recent months, here is a sampling of what prospective landlords may ask you:

Where do you live currently and why are you moving? What is your previous history with your landlord? Can he or she vouch for you? What do you do for a living? How much do you make? Do you have any criminal record? What is your credit score? What’s your rental history? Do you have pets? How much do they weigh? Do you have veterinary paperwork for them? 

And my personal favorite: What would better sell you to us as the ideal tenant?

Over the last month, as I’ve embarked on my own odyssey to find an apartment whose price doesn’t feel like highway robbery – one that comes sans cockroaches, and with more than a single window – that last question has burrowed into my skin.  I am allergic to the idea that, in addition to giving away close to half of my take-home pay to a stranger, I must also convince the stranger to take it. Life is but an episode of The Bachelor, and I its poorest-performing contestant.

The very few times I did hear back from the dozen-plus rentals I contacted, it was to tell me the apartments had already been leased. “I am very sorry,” one property owner wrote me, “but in the time between me sending [you an] email this morning and receiving your email, an application was submitted.”

When DCist asked readers in early June to share their most harrowing stories about trying to find an apartment, they didn’t disappoint: I heard from dozens of people who said they spent months running ragged, getting scammed, out-bidded, and ghosted by brokers and property managers alike. Commiserating with a friend about my own luck, she told me about an acquaintance who, upon touring an apartment, asked the landlord when he planned to patch up a gouged-out section of the living room wall. He wasn’t, he apparently told her – the rental price was “reflective of the hole.”

Broader trends in the housing market explain at least some of this competition, which peaks during the busy May to September season. MLS listings show that there were 351 apartments renting below $2,000 per month available between April 1 and July 1 this year, fewer than the 388 listed over the same period last year. 

Prices, meanwhile, have marginally risen. Two real estate sites, Zumper and RentCafe, place the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in D.C. at just below $2,400. Zillow pegs it at more than $2,600. In rent-stabilized buildings, too, rent increases hit historic highs this year before the D.C. Council voted to temporarily reduce them – and even that only applies to units built before 1976.

Twenty-five-year-old Olivia I. started looking for a new apartment last summer after her roommate needed to move out of their shared space. What she found over months of searching, she says, was bleak. “A lot of places were, like, $2,000-plus for a studio and had cockroaches. There was a fight happening in the lobby of one of the places that I toured.” (Olivia asked DCist/WAMU to withhold her last name, as her lease is soon up for renewal.)

So when she heard from a friend that a unit in their Logan Circle building would soon go on the market, she jumped at the chance to rent it, without even going on a tour. But there was a catch: “The leasing agent who I spoke to said, ‘if you want this apartment, [the listing] is going to go up at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, and if you want to be the one to get it, you need to be the first to apply at 3 a.m.’ So, in no uncertain terms, wake up this early to apply.” She did, and ultimately moved in.

“The rental market is the wild, wild west, and there is no standard way or standard operating procedure of how people handle applications, how people handle the rental process,” says Lindsay Dreyer, CEO of boutique real estate firm City Chic Real Estate. “You have to move crazy quickly. So by the time something is on Zillow or Craigslist or hits the MLS, if you’re seeing it two days after it gets listed, you’re probably too late.”

Dreyer’s company handles upwards of 250 rentals per year, and she says the vast majority of demand is for “affordable” apartments, or units that rent below $2,000 per month. Those units – often one-off condos for rent in smaller buildings – can see bidding wars, which she says aren’t all that uncommon. Some tenants will offer to chip in an extra $50 per month to make their application stand out, while Dreyer says she’s seen other units rent at $500-$600 above asking price.

“Where we are running into I feel [are] massive inventory problems and competition are the affordable units,” Dreyer says, noting that some property owners will intentionally list an apartment at slightly below market rate to entice more applicants – and potentially trigger a bidding war. “You know, it’s supply [and] demand. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with a market. And the rental market is no different than any other market.”

One renter in Vienna, Virginia told DCist/WAMU that the single family home they hoped to rent received eight applications within 48 hours, with hopeful tenants entering into a bidding war for the house. That renter, who asked to remain anonymous, told us they got the house and moved in this month – but had to offer $250 a month over the asking price.

Twenty-four-year-old Julia Ford told us she’s routinely been bait-and-switched. She once thought she was going to see a third-floor, one-bedroom apartment in Tenleytown for about $1,400 – until she showed up and was told the apartment was actually in the basement. The unit advertised online, meanwhile, was actually $1,900. (One reader, who asked to stay anonymous because she’s still looking for an apartment, said that someone posing as an agent at a high-end firm asked for the equivalent of two months’ worth of rent before she could even apply for or view the apartment.)

This isn’t Ford’s first time looking for an apartment in D.C. She says she moved to Alexandria last year because the District grew too expensive for her, though she’d like to shave time off her hour-and-a-half-long commute.

Inventory was also a problem for Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. She uses a wheelchair, and had to tour 10 properties – looking between Chinatown, Foggy Bottom, and Navy Yard – just to find one that met her accessibility needs, checking to see whether the direction the bathroom door swings could accommodate her wheelchair, or whether knobs to operate the oven and stove were at an appropriate height for her. 

“You can’t really trust when an apartment complex says that they’re accessible, right? Because everybody’s idea of accessibility is a bit different, depending on: Do you have a disability? What type of disability do you have? Are they saying it’s accessible based on [federal] regulations, or are they saying it’s accessible [because] it has no stairs?” Ives-Rublee says. “It really requires you to go to every single apartment that you plan to look at or are interested in, to be able to see if it will actually meet your needs.”

Ives-Rublee also noticed that many of the “accessible” units she saw advertised were actually reserved for renters through the city’s Inclusionary Zoning program, a lottery-based system that is, ironically, intended to boost D.C.’s supply of affordable housing.

Another common refrain we heard is that companies are charging exorbitant application fees, with little guidance about what they were looking for from prospective tenants. 

Sarah Ball, a 23-year-old who moved from Des Moines, Iowa to D.C., says she and her partner spent weeks looking for an apartment somewhere along the Metro’s red line. They paid $100 to apply for an apartment through property management company Bozzuto, which didn’t list any credit requirements on the application form.

“I was immediately rejected. Like, it didn’t even take three seconds for me to be rejected,” Ball says. She ultimately heard that the screening company believed she didn’t have a long enough credit history, but wasn’t refunded the money she spent to apply. Despite both she and her partner working full-time jobs and supporting themselves for years – including taking on a car lease  – Ball says she ultimately had to ask her mom to sign on as a guarantor just to get prospective landlords to consider her application.

While it’s illegal in D.C. to deny renters housing because of their credit score alone, property owners can consider an applicant’s comprehensive credit history. One Navy Yard apartment complex infamously denied freshman Congressman Maxwell Frost (D-FL) housing last December because of his poor credit history.

Even those who managed to find apartments during the pandemic – when property management companies enticed prospective tenants with thousand-dollar discounts – are now waking up to the reality of being saddled with high rents in buildings not subject to rent stabilization. 

One 27-year-old man who lives in the Atlantic Plumbing building on 8th St. NW says he received two free months of rent when he first moved in at the end of 2020. But last year, his rent soared from $1,670 to $2,119 – a 27% increase that, including the two-month discount amortized over his time at the building, was effectively a 40% hike. “Suffice it to say, my cost of living adjustment did not increase [the same amount] over that time period. Simply outrageous,” he says.

Another woman, 26-year-old Makenna Sievertson, says she had to move back home to Los Angeles because she couldn’t afford renting in D.C. anymore. She was already spending close to 70% of her paycheck as a staffer on the Hill on her $2,600 rent for an apartment in NoMa. But when she received notice that her rent would go up to $3,200 – before fees for pets and utilities – she decided to call it quits. 

“[Leases] are at like unattainable prices for the average D.C. citizen,” Olivia I. says. “I am worried that at the end of the year, [my landlord is] going to raise my rent to something that I could no longer afford, in which case I have to do it all over again.”

My own search for an apartment stalled, too. Disillusioned and disinclined to make a choice I’d regret out of desperation, I put all my things in storage, packed up my car, and decided to spend the summer house-sitting for a friend in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. 

I’m waiting for things to cool off – if they ever do. I’ll find out when I start back at square one in September.