I lived at the two addresses above. 3064 was a two-bedroom apartment I shared with Abed until September of 2000. 3068 was a one-bedroom where I lived by myself until December 2001. At that point, I had lost my job and had to move back in with Abed and his wife Qued. All three of us moved out of the apartment in March of 2002 into two separate residences.
Abed and I had anticipated moving out of the cottage before January of 1999. However, for the first time since I'd moved to San Diego, I was having a LOT of trouble trying to find a new apartment. It was a landlord's market at the time and every place we went to had dozens of applicants.
Originally, Abed wanted to rent a house. He wanted to be able to be in a situation in which he could play his guitar without disturbing neighbors. But all the houses for rent would have one really good bedroom and one cruddy bedroom. They weren't worth living in. We did manage to find a two bedroom/two bath townhouse apartment that was the end unit. This was something Abed was a little more comfortable with. We were able to apply and were being strongly considered.
However, Abed suddenly lost his job at Peet's Coffeehouse. This forced us to look at lower-priced apartments. I found one great place that was two bedroom/two bathroom in our new price range. Abed and I rushed down to the property management company, paid $15 cash each for them to run a credit check and got receipts. (And this was a separate issue: Almost every place we went to expected us to pay for the credit checks. It was like, if we were going to get to move, we probably weren't going to have enough for the deposit because we were shelling out so much for the credit checks.)
So, we waited to hear back about that apartment. After two weeks, we didn't hear anything and it was almost the end of December. I had to call my current properly management company to get a two-week extension on my notice. Fortunately, they agreed and asked me to pay two weeks' rent. That wasn't a problem, but we were still facing a rapidly-approaching deadline.
I then found a property management company on Adams Ave. (which was just a few blocks away from the cottage). I got a copy of their listings and saw a two-bedroom/one bath apartment for $550 a month. And it happened to be right next door. The company was closed at the time (but had listings outside). I was able to open the gate and find the apartment. I looked in the window and saw that it was decent and was probably the best place we would be able to get. I told Abed about it. He said he would go over the next day and get a better look.
He was able to go into the apartment. He liked that it was at the end and the bedrooms didn't share a wall with other units. This meant he could play his guitar. But they already had someone expressing an interest. They were just waiting for the results of the credit check. However, they gave him credit applications and asked him to call the next day to see if the current applicants had been approved. They also required money for the credit check. We filled out the applications that night and had the money ready.
The next morning, I went to work. He called the company and they said the current applicant had been denied. He immediately grabbed the applications and the cash and RAN all the way to the company to turn them in. We now had a lock on the apartment while they were running our credit reports. At the end of the day, we got good news. We would be able to move into the apartment before we needed to be out of the cottage.
But we still had one unresolved issue: The last management company in which we paid for a credit check. I was perplexed by this. When my Dad owned apartments, he couldn't stand if a unit was vacant for more than one month. He would lose revenue. I didn't know why the property management company was allowing that unit to remain unoccupied when they obviously had people who wanted to rent it. Since they never got back to us, I thought we should pay them a visit with our receipts to see if we could get our money back.
We arrived and told someone why we were there. He told us the applications were in the other room and we could try to find ours. (I guess he was busy with something more pressing.) So we had access to all these applications they hadn't called out on. We managed to find ours and they still had our $15 cash payments clipped to them. We just took the applications and our cash and left. (I don't recall if the other applications had cash attached to them, but we were not thieves.) I couldn't believe that we managed to get refunds that easily. (I'll bet we would have been scrutinized if that guy hadn't been tied up with something else at the time.)
We were able to move in and we didn't have any more trouble after that.
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