Carrick is a family-oriented Pittsburgh neighborhood that offers affordable, solid housing. Few houses are on the rental market at a given time. Renting a house in Carrick calls for a lot of looking and a sprinkle of luck.
Check off a list of what the community must have. Local public schools include Carrick High School. Phillips Park and Volunteers Field are handy. Carnegie Library – Carrick is state of the art. Plots can be rented at Hilltop Urban Farm to create a vegetable garden. Brownsville Road has a supermarket, hardware stores, hair salons and many small shops, and continues into a business district in Brentwood. The 51-Carrick bus travels Brownsville Road every five to ten minutes through the day.
Write a list that is specific to the house. How many bedrooms and bathrooms are needed? Does it have to come with a stove, refrigerator, washer and dryer? Is there a pet? How big does the back yard have to be?
Carrick is affordable. Still, figure out how much can actually be afforded. People are encouraged not to spend more than 30% of their gross income on housing. Housing expenses include rent and anything else a home renter is expected to handle – for instance, utilities, tools to maintain the yard or shovel the walk, often a washer and dryer, and renters insurance.
Landlords have added their listings to home rental websites, which also show additional listings from other rental websites. As a result, those websites offer fairly complete lists of houses that are available to rent. Listings are usually broken out by zip code. The 15210 zip code covers many neighborhoods. With a map, people can focus on Carrick. Many of the housing rental websites listed below have apartments, town homes and houses. Use their filters to search for houses only. Some charge to apply to rent a house. Many verify listings before they’re posted.
- Hotpads, which is aimed more at people looking for apartments than houses, showed half-a-dozen houses for rent in Carrick. It offered a good search experience using their filters and search box. Results were displayed on a map.
- Clicking the houses tab at Rent.com and typing 15210 into the search box showed a map with four houses for rent in Carrick, one in Knoxville and three in Mt Oliver Borough. The site had few filtering options, although clicking or touching the markers popped up a summary that led to extensive information about each house.
- Listings at ForRent.com could be limited to the 15210 zip code, houses only, units below a certain rent, and how many bedrooms or bathrooms were needed. Results were displayed on a map. Four houses were shown in Carrick and one in Knoxville.
- Trulia results can be filtered for only houses within a price range, number of bedrooms, whether pets are allowed, or if air conditioning, washer and drier, or equipped kitchen is part of the rent. It showed a map with three houses for rent in Carrick and one in Knoxville.
- Apartments.com showed all the properties they have in a zip code. Their filters were applied to show only houses, maximum rent, number of bedrooms needed and a host of amenities. It showed four houses available to rent in Carrick and one in Knoxville. Because it is so apartment-focused, it makes sense to use it as a supplement to other sites.
- With Zillow, results can be narrowed based on square footage, the number of bathrooms, the year the house was built and other criteria. It showed three houses in Carrick and one in Knoxville on a map.
- Craigslist can connect people looking to rent a house directly with landlords. A lot of time can be lost just browsing through their listings, although they can be sorted by zip code and placed into a map view. More apartments and duplexes were seen than houses for rent in Carrick. The downside is that it’s an open marketplace. People looking to rent through Craigslist are encouraged to meet the person who posted a listing in public and bring a friend.
- Realtor.com offered rental listings even though it exists to sell houses and accepts listings only from licensed real estate agents. Their results were shown on a map – three houses for rent in Carrick and one in Knoxville. Use Realtor.com to supplement searching at other sites on this list.
Most of the houses listed for rent in the 15210 zip code were in Arlington, the South Side Slopes and Allentown, with a handful in Carrick. It could be the same few houses for rent in Carrick are shown on all the sites, as many of them share listings.
Armed with a short list of possible homes to rent in Carrick, tour them. During the inspection, questions should be asked – who’s responsible for what? What if the toilet becomes plugged? Is it pet friendly? And the other questions that were written down before starting to look for a house to rent. When all the questions have been answered satisfactorily, it may be time to sign the lease and move in.