I recently moved to the Chicago area, and spent quite a bit of time looking for apartments that included a garage or some sort of storage. While I wasn’t able to find an apartment with a garage before I had to move, I did find a weekly rental that is allowing me to find an apartment with one.
It seems that a lot of people end up renting garage space at someone’s home, or renting a storage unit. Not a great number of apartments come with garage or storage space, and when they do, you can bet that they’re the “luxury” type. Apartment hunting with a motorcycle is hard!!
What I’ve found helpful is this:
- Rent.com doesn’t list garages, but it lists “parking available” for places. That’s not terribly bad, but it’s not all that helpful, either.
- Padmapper.com lets you search by keyword, so you can find a garage.
- Craigslist is always an option, of course. There you can definitely search for garages or storage.
- Walkscore.com only really works for larger cities with good public transit, but not only can you search by commute time, you can search for garages, too.
- Trulia.com had some pretty great results, and like several other options, lets you search by keyword. It only worked in Firefox for me, though, so that was annoying.
- Forrent.com lets you search by amenities, and definitely by garages.
Of course, there’s other options out there, too, but these are the main ones I used for apartment hunting, since they seemed to have more results than many of the others.
I ended up finding my place on Craigslist, because I think most of the other sites have more high end apartments, and I’m more budget minded than that. Nearly all of them on Rent.com had fitness centers or pools. I wasn’t as interested in that as I was having a place to store my motorcycle near my apartment.
With my current apartment, originally there wasn’t any mention of my motorcycle, but when I talked to the landlord about moving out to find a spot for the bike, he offered up the storage shed for my motorcycle. I get to bring it down now! I’m going to take the train back to Michigan and will ride the motorcycle down.
