Living off-campus becoming better option
With the Board of Trustees’ decision to raise the cost of on-campus room and board rates 6.25 percent, many Eastern students might chose to live in apartments off-campus next year.
There are several options to keep in mind when making the jump to off-campus living, but students must act quickly before the best deals are gone.
“We are running out really fast and renting very quick for the fall,” said Chenoa Haynes, the Illinois Regional Manager for Campus Pointe.
Campus Pointe runs the series of apartment buildings past Wal-Mart, located at the intersection of Route 16 and Hawthorne Drive.
Time is running out to get into apartments closer to campus as well.
Ronald Rardin, who co-owns RCR Rentals with his wife Lori, has been a landlord in Charleston for more than a decade.
“My recommendation is, at this time of year, find where you want to live, be comfortable with it and sign up,” said Rardin. “You don’t want to wait much longer. Valentine’s Day has always seemed like a cut off day for me.”
Another local Charleston landlord, Tonya Jensen of Jensen Rentals, said that while there are still units available, they would be gone before fall semester starts.
“There are usually a handful still available at this time, but the majority (are) gone before Christmas,” said Jensen. “We need about 14 more renters and I’ll be completely full, and we are full every year.”
Despite the landlords urging students to begin looking for apartments as soon as possible, there are still some students who end up satisfied, despite beginning their search late.
Mark Wegener, a junior history major with a teaching certification, was lucky with his late search.
“I started looking in March to April,” said Wegener.
Wegener was able to find a single -person apartment with Carlyle Apartments, which he said he is satisfied with.
One of the factors in Wegener’s favor in finding an apartment so late was that he was looking for a single, which Rardin said tend to be available for longer than the places for multiple people. Rardin added that multiple-person apartments fill up before Thanksgiving.
Utility costs
Regardless of the size of a student’s group, all of the landlords spoken to agreed that the most important thing students should do when signing the lease papers is understand how they will pay for utilities.
Jensen said the source of most students’ confusion comes from “all-inclusive” rates.
She said that some of these rates only cover a student’s utility cost up to a certain amount, and when the student goes over, they have to pay the difference.
“Students have been moving away from the all-inclusive rates because the landlord or the management company is saying ‘you owe me x amount of dollars because you’ve gone over on your electric’ and they were never aware because they didn’t read the fine print of the lease,” said Jensen.
Rardin said he has had students who rent from other landlords come to him with $700 gas and electric bill that they received after being gone on break.
He said bills that high come from inefficient furnaces and poor insulation, two things that students should find out if their property has before moving in.
Campus Pointe offers “all-inclusive” rates with allowances on electricity, but Haynes said they make it clear to students that they understand what they are signing.
She said the most important thing a student could do when getting an apartment is to read everything they sign.
Wegener said when he signed up for his apartment, he was pretty thorough, and his landlord did a good job of going through all of the costs of apartment living.
Wegener said, in addition to checking every apartment complex for damage, students should also get to know their landlord well.
“Make sure that you can get along with them,” cautioned Wegener. “I see my landlord as a kind of roommate that just doesn’t live with you.”
Doug T. Graham can be reached at 581-7942
Living off-campus becoming better option
House-hunting becomes difficult as students wait until the last minute to look for available leases for next fall. (Megan Mathy / The Daily Eastern News)
