Moving to Chicago?  Or just looking to relocate from within the city?  There are plenty of places to search for Chicago apartment listings.

The first spot to look, in this age of online information that we live in, is the Internet.  Craigslist.org is a great tool for even the most computer-illiterate among us.  The site offers an easy-to-use layout that allows you to search by full-lease apartments, rented rooms, sublets, housing wanted ads, housing swaps (for the adventurous among us), and other random real estate sections.  For most people, they will be looking in the apartments, rooms, and sublets sections.  From here, you can search for keywords, such as neighborhood name, train line, smoking preference, or any other term that you can think of.  The search query function also allows you to search by price – with a minimum and/or maximum cutoff.

The next tool an apartment seeker could use is a website called Cribq.com, which piggybacks on Craigslist’s already immense database of ads and also augments your search with a nice Google Maps component.  This makes finding an apartment by neighborhood and price much easier.  You can also search by rooms or sublets, or pretty much anything that you can search for using Craigslist itself in the housing section.

Once you have exhausted your Craigslist postings, the next local avenue for Chicago apartment listings that you should check out is the Chicago Reader.  The Reader is Chicago’s long-running free weekly paper.  It carries essential information about local music and arts, along with well-written journalistic pieces on Chicago-related topics.  For your use, however, use it to browse a well-stocked listing of apartment classifieds – the ads that used to comprise the bulk of Chicago apartment listings before the Internet came to town.  These are usually listed in the back of the news magazine and are listed by price.  There is also a section for roommates wanted, similar to the Craigslist format.

The last, old-fashioned way to search for Chicago apartments is to narrow down your neighborhood search and walk around the streets.  The obvious disadvantage to this is that your capability to filter out based on certain qualifiers may diminish.  But the advantage to this, depending on the amount of time you dedicate to it is greatly increased.  First of all, you don’t have to deal with spammy ads that obviously upsell what you are searching for.  Secondly, you can usually physically see the house and walk the neighborhood right then.  And thirdly, most blue-collar Chicago folks that are renting apartments may not be on Craigslist, which takes the rent down a nice percentage, since your pool of competing renters is much smaller.

In any case, with the wealth of good housing stock, there are seemingly endless possibilities for Chicago renters.  Happy huting!