Apartment hunting: Tips for finding your space in Huntsville during a ‘building boom’

HUNTSVILLE, Ala (WHNT)- While new homes and neighborhoods are going up at a record speed, apartments are going up even faster.

“We’ve added 71 new apartment complexes … that’s 18,000 plus units,” said Cliff Mann.

Maddie McBride started her apartment search in June.

“On their website, they’ll have a huge price range… I wish I would have kind of realized… even though it could be the same floor plan and the same square footage, that units can still be a different price,” said Maddie McBride.

Luke Vailes moved in just this month.

“I moved from one end of the state to the other and was really excited about this job,” said Vailes. “Housing was probably the biggest issue for me.  I was looking for something that was affordable, well, updated.”

The two are recent college graduates, who, like many, moved to the Rocket City after accepting a new job. From a renter’s perspective, it’s a good time to join the hunt.

“You know, 4 or 5 years ago, we had a severe housing shortage, both single-family and multi-family, and so we couldn’t build fast enough,” said David Wilson.

Wilson is a senior real estate director who’s tracked Huntsville’s market for the past 27 years.

“And so the combination of undersupply, historically low interest rates, available land, rent growth and occupancies … that poured rocket fuel on the development world,” said Wilson.

He said renter’s incentives used to be rare, but that’s changed.

“Pretty much every place I visited had some sort of incentives,” said Vailes. “Most of them were all 1 to 2 months rent-free if you signed up. Some of them were if you apply within the next 48 hours after the tour, you get your application fee or the administration fee returned to you.”

Reporter Nicki Marker started with News 19 in the first week of July, and she went through an apartment hunt not even three months ago. After finding her space in the Rocket City, Nicki advises you to:

• Consider $100 worth of fees a month when making your budget
• Understand the prices online oftentimes just reflect the cheapest unit of that size
• Touring in person vs online will give you a clearer picture of what you’ll be paying for

As for McBride, she toured 5 apartment complexes.

“Try your best to narrow down what you want, and then go and tour, and if that’s not what you want, then go find other places instead of wasting your time,  looking at a place like and being like ‘ehhh, I might like it,” said McBride.

Vailes found it takes time and luck.

“See the town, because all the different places that I looked online and booked tours for, I ended up not working out one way or another,” said Vailes. “Not all of them were bad, there were just certain things I found that I could live with, but, I found the place that I live, basically just on a whim, touring around and neighboring areas.”

They had to cover a lot of ground, but McBride and Vailes both found what they were looking for.

“It’s a little bit more expensive than other places in Madison, but I’ve really enjoyed being able to walk to a trash pandas game, walk to go get food, etc,” said McBride. “So yeah, I really do think that it’s worth the money.”

“I could have gone for somewhere cheaper, but it’s the incentives on top of this place being brand new and having pretty much everything I was looking for made it the easiest choice,” said Vailes.

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