I feel like every time we found a place to rent it was word of mouth. Even buying our house was word of mouth. Good luck! Don’t give up.

A lot of places don’t advertise regularly online unfortunately, if you can drive around some of the neighborhoods you can usually find signs in front of buildings with leasing info

craigslist, zillow, drive around

When I moved to Lakewood, I used a combination of Apartments.com, Zillow, Realtor.com and read reviews from those sites and Google. I'd send an email to the leasing office and they would confirm availability, pricing, offer a tour, etc. Good luck!

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Pro Tip: Avoid Activity Residential managed/owned properties like the plague.

There are lots of great places in Lakewood, of all different prices and sizes. There are also plenty of below-average places. It depends on what you are looking for; I use Zillow and set the filters for price and square footage. You can also use the map feature to search for availabilities in specific areas of Lakewood. That way you can compare prices in the same area/neighborhood.

I always check for the posting to have lots of high-quality pictures. Updated or recently renovated is important to some people, especially when it comes to appliances. I've seen very old and dated apartments that are spacious for $800 per month and I've seen modern, new apartments that are tiny for $600 per month.

You can save searches and have the website email you when a new posting that fits your filters appears, that way you can be on top of new places that you might like.

I’d say start West of Warren and North of Madison, then circle the search out from there. Those are the areas most likely to be owner occupied or in a cool, nice, interesting area.

There are cool, nicer places near Madison, but they’re most recently developed in regard to that kind of thing.

Northwestern Lakewood’s been the nicer, more interesting area for the longest amount of time.