 What is going on everybody? Welcome back to my channel. Today we are joined with a very special guest. Once again, my lovely wife, Adriana. Today we're going to be talking about what it's like to move to New York City in the middle of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. So let's get into it, this video with the reason why we're actually moving to New York City. Before we start this video, make sure you watch all the way till the end because you may see a sneak preview of our apartment. As most of you already know, I'm originally from there and Michael matched his fellowship back in New York. So it's that time of the year and we're heading back home. So I'll be heading back to New York in the next couple of weeks and Michael will be coming there at the end of the month. I have my orientation at in the middle of June but I wanted to get our apartment set up before my job and as well as before Michael gets into town. Yeah, it's really nice actually because I have to stay here till the end of June almost and she starts her job before me which means she'll be moving up and also means she'll be driving around crazy with helping me set up my apartment. Yeah, I don't have to do, I don't know how I lucked out on not having to do any unpacking, but I promise you I'm doing my fair share in the packing process. So he thinks. So now that you know why we're moving to New York, let's talk about what exactly we were looking for in New York City. So living down in North Carolina kind of spoiled us because we were definitely able to get a more luxury apartment for half the price of New York. So we had to keep that in mind. At least half the price. Yeah, so you definitely have to keep that in mind. But in New York City as most of you all know, or if you haven't lived there, you really have to kind of pick and choose what you want because there's a good chance the apartment you're looking for is not going to have everything. Yeah, not every apartment is going to meet all of your criteria. In fact, it may miss most of your criteria, but you may be able to live without something. The whole city is essentially like, what are you willing to live without? Right, yeah, that's a good way to put it. That's like all it is. So everybody brings their whole list of things they want in an apartment and then you slowly kind of knock off things that you can live without. Unless, if you don't do that, you're going to end up paying like $6,000 for a one bedroom apartment. At least, which I mean, not many people can afford that. Let's just put it that way. So we basically were looking for either a one or two bedroom apartment on the east side. Of Manhattan. Yes. We wanted to be in Manhattan since both of our jobs are in Manhattan, even though we could get something cheaper, living in either Queens, but really convenience is ideal when it comes to being able to just walk to your job. Yeah, we wanted to be able to walk to work and we wanted something right in the middle, or we wanted our apartment to be right in the middle of under the honest job and also my job. Right. Because we're selling both of our cars in the next few weeks and we'll be walking to work essentially or taking the subway if we need to, but. Yeah, so that's another thing that we kind of try to play into apartment hunting is even if we didn't have one of our needs or it didn't meet the criteria, it was definitely location was key for us Yeah, location is everything. You wanna be close to work because when we first met when I was doing surgery in the upper east side of Lenox Hill Hospital, I lived literally across the street from the hospital and it was like. It was a dream. Awesome, it was a dream. Yes. Yeah, waking up and just rolling out of bed and going into work was everything and especially when I'm in fellowship and going to be on call all the time, I wanted to be in close proximity to my hospital. So that was kind of big on our list and that was one thing we were not going to settle on. So that was our location. Next was how many bedrooms we wanted. We were looking for two bedrooms just to have extra storage space, but that also comes with a higher price tag. Yeah. So. Extra bedroom starts going up really quickly. We've lived in a one bedroom here for the last couple of years and it's really no different us moving this one bedroom to a new one bedroom, so. We have a little bit more storage space. Yeah, a little more storage space there. I wanted to have a two bedroom for the sake of having my own YouTube area or studio per se where I could just come after work, have everything set up and just start filming, but again, you gotta slowly start chopping off things that you want and things that you can live without. I told Michael I'll set up the camera for him. Yeah, I will in this new apartment, which we'll get to. I'll have my own little desk area. Yeah, a desk area. So that was the compromise. Yeah, that was the compromise. It's a one bedroom with a little extra space so we can put a desk. So when it comes to knocking off priorities for your apartment search, we were looking for essentially a couple of different things. We wanted a washroom dryer in unit. Yes. We wanted an elevator building. I really wanted a gym in our apartment. We have one here. It's really nice to wake up before work and get a workout in. It also, in the end, kind of saves you money with paying for a gym membership. Yeah, if you don't have to pay, I mean, New York gyms can be pretty expensive, you know, 80, 180, $250 a month. And if you don't have to pay that, saves you quite a bit of money. The other main thing I didn't want to go without was sunlight, natural light. Yes, he was so picky with these windows. Oh my God, natural light is so hard to find in New York City because you live in these tall buildings and there's so many buildings around the windows. I just feel like all the apartments are really narrow. They just go out and then one window directly. If you think about it, Manhattan, if you have a southern-facing window, you get daylight or sunlight throughout the entire 24 hours, well, throughout the daytime. But if you're facing east or west or north, you may not get sunlight at all, or you may get sunlight a little bit of the day or the morning or just the evening or whatnot. So I wanted something that had full range of sunlight because it just makes you so much happier having sunlight. So I wanted a balcony as well, but alas, it's New York City and you gotta pay for those balconies. So now let's get into how we actually search for our apartment. I think I was on Street Easy for the last two months. Easily, every day. Every day. Multiple times a day. I'm sending Michael emails. Or just as soon as I woke up, I would just scroll through just to see if there were any new apartment listings and even when I came home from work or downtime. Yeah, and for those of you who don't know what Street Easy is, it's basically, it's a website, but it's also an app. What was the other one called? The other one that we were looking at is renthop as well. Renthop.com. I'm not sponsored by these people or companies at all, but we use them when we thought they were really good you can kind of filter by what size apartment you want. All the amenities that you want. Then it has direct contact to the broker who is listing that apartment. So, we pretty much in this time had to do 100% of everything online and over the phone. Everything was virtual pretty much. Even though I had family there, I really didn't want anyone going into these apartments and looking for us. I just didn't want anyone to leave their house if they didn't need to. So, we were really picky with the layouts, the videos that they provided, and the pictures just because we knew that we weren't actually going to be able to see them. Yeah, I had this whole big expectation that I was going to take multiple weekend trips. Yeah, I hadn't actually planned. I had a flight booked. Yeah, I wanted to have all these flights booked and I was going to bring you all along on multiple different vlogs. New York City, like, searching for apartments. So, it's going to be super cool, super helpful to show everybody what it's like to get an apartment in New York City because it's different from literally anywhere else in the US or world for that matter. But then, this whole COVID thing kind of hit us and we weren't able to go see any apartment. Yep. So, we had to do everything virtually. The thing with these New York apartments is there's such a spectrum. The range of apartments you get is anything from something in the basement of a floor, a building with, like, dingy, no sunlight to a super nice luxury apartment or you may also get a kind of crappy apartment that they may look good in the pictures. Yeah, or, like, your kitchen is literally a fridge, a stove, and one cabinet. Yeah. And that is your kitchen. It's also, like, I'm like, I can do that. Yeah, I mean, my first apartment, well, not my first one, but the one I lived in for my intern year. Yeah, the fridge was basically in the living room. Not basically, it was. It was the fridge. And then the TV stand. So, the fridge literally was in my living room. Yeah. But that's just New York. So, yeah, so this is why I was so skeptical about renting virtually, even though they send you all these videos and stuff, you can't really look at the baseboards, you can't tell if the floor is even, you can't tell if the tile is... Forget about the floor, I just need to make sure that it's clean. Yeah, well, either way, it's just like, I mean, some of these buildings are 100 plus years old and, I mean, unless you can see them and lay your eyes on them, it's hard to really trust them. Plus, people in New York are always trying to kind of rip you off in a way and everybody's always trying to make a buck in New York off of you. So, you have to kind of be extra cautious, in my opinion. So, I probably inquired into probably over, I don't know, 200 apartments. 200? I don't know. Maybe like 50. Okay. 200. I did, I swear, I probably did. Maybe, you're crazy. I probably inquired into about, maybe like 50 apartments. At least, yeah. And the brokers would email me back. Constantly. Yeah. I found this apartment. Luckily. Yeah, no, I found this apartment, it was beautiful. Wait, which apartment? The one that we currently... Oh, the one that we currently have. And Michael and the broker reached out to me. Amazing lady. She was so helpful. Just, she just gave me everything I needed right then and there. She pretty much didn't beat around the bush or try to trick me into... She's a pure straight shooter. Yeah. Which I love. So I really enjoyed that. She also, there was also no broker's fee, which was another plus of hours or... Yeah, let's talk about the broker fee. So for those of you who haven't rented in Manhattan, there's this thing that you have to pay for sometimes called a broker fee. And what that fee is for, still I've yet to discover, but it's exorbitantly expensive. Yeah, it could be up to 15% of your annual rent. So I mean, you're talking, yeah, 15% of 40 or $50,000, which is not a small amount. Or it could be your first month's rent. Yeah, or it could be first month's rent, or it could be one or two months' rent. Yeah. And this broker's fee is essentially, I don't, I really don't know what it's for, to be honest with you. What I got out of it was essentially the broker is like your leasing agent. So here we have our own leasing office that does your contract and everything like that, but certain apartments... And they get a commission off of leasing apartments. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But with certain apartments in New York, I think these apartments hire brokers to do all the in-between stuff when it comes to finding the right candidates and just sending all their pictures, sending the videos, giving them a tour, everything that comes with it. Yeah, but what I have, I have a big problem with this because when we're trying to look for all these apartments virtually, we're doing all the legwork essentially, looking online, street easy, finding these apartments, we're emailing the broker and all they're doing is sending us either more pictures or a video of the apartment and that's it. And then I have to decide if I want a lease or not. And then I'm supposed to pay them $10,000 for what, for emailing me. Right, but they would also give us the tour. Like we were there. I know, but they don't, yeah. They would give us the tour. But still, a tour worth $10,000, I'm in the wrong business because that's crazy money. Sorry, I have strong feelings about this. So there are, there are multiple apartments that do not have broker's fee, broker's fees. And that's exactly what we were trying to go after. And luckily we found that we were thinking about renting one with a broker's fee, but it would have to kind of blow me away for me to just kind of throw away $10,000. Our current apartment didn't have one, but our broker was absolutely amazing. We actually did a FaceTime video tour with her. Twice. Yeah, twice. And when we saw that apartment, we kind of just were like, let's book it. Yeah, 100%. And there's no broker fee. Love the apartment. Love the amenities of the building. I love the location of the building. And it pretty much had everything we wanted except the in-unit washroom dryer. So we had to do it without the in-unit washroom dryer, but the only reason I did that is because they have a ton of like brand new. The laundry room is kind of right next door to the gym. So I'm like, we could, yeah, I'm like, okay. Maybe we can drop a load and go to the gym and vice versa. So yeah, so we ended up finding a nice one bedroom apartment having almost everything we needed. And we are super excited about it. She moves up first. I move up afterwards. And now, since you made it this far in the video, I'll show you a little sneak peek about what our apartment looks like. And then maybe we'll give a little apartment tour when it's actually, when we're both there. Yeah, and then that's what I wanted to do. As soon as we're both there, I want to do a full apartment tour. Let me know in the comments below if you guys want to see that or are interested in it. Yeah. And we'll show it to you once we get in and move in and get settled. So I want to show it to you all. It's beautiful. So here's a little sneak peek and you'll see the rest later on. So that officially concludes this video and our experience on apartment hunting in New York City during a pandemic, which I hope never happens again. So as always, make sure you smash that like and subscribe button and follow me on Instagram if you don't already. Leave a comment below if I liked it and I'll respond to it. 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