In order to make your college living experience better, you need to spend the time developing relationships within your college home environment.
It’s not always a fun prospect searching for college apartments, but it’s always worth your while to take some personal actions in making the process better. While you might feel rebellious at your college age, making conscientious decisions in creating worthwhile relationships while in your apartment helps toward goodwill. It also helps in giving you better opportunities in career ties and saving money.
Outside any romantic relationships you have, what platonic relationships should you nurture while in your college apartment? You have much more to consider beyond just your roommates.
Creating a Good Relationship with the Property Manager
It’s always worth thinking about maintaining a good relationship with the person or people managing your apartment. This should already be established from the beginning by negotiating on rent or perhaps taking advantage of free rent offers for the first month. Some apartments near colleges offer these deals for students as a way to gain renters.
Be respectful of the apartment manager’s who offer these student discounts. You may even have to negotiate further if something happens financially and you can’t pay all your rent each month. Having a friendship with the manager makes negotiations easier, especially when you show good faith by paying as much rent money up front as you can.
The same goes for when you need maintenance done in the apartment. One of the worst experiences is requesting repairs and having it delayed or never done because the manager doesn’t like you as a tenant. While everybody differs on politics and personal things, don’t let this get in the way of staying on friendly terms with your owner-manager.
Much of this starts by following the rules and not being a rebel as college-age students sometimes are.
Creating Good Relationships with Neighbors
This is much more important than you realize, and you’ll find many online who recommend it as part of your college apartment experience. In times of emergency, you can’t necessarily depend on the manager-owner being available at all times. What happens if you have a major emergency, and the manager is away for a few days? While there might be a fill-in manager, it’s a different story when it comes to preventing crime.
Much like neighborhood watch policies, by knowing your neighbors, you’ll all work together to weed out any neighborhood crime issues. Conversely, they’ll also know you better if you decide to have a wild party in your apartment.
Being a college student, partying is inevitable eventually, unless you’re overly conservative or conscientious. If a party becomes unruly, your neighbors will already have your phone number if you gave it to them when first meeting. This saves a neighbor you don’t know calling the police and potentially getting you in trouble.
Make an effort to get to know your neighbors when you first move in to your apartment. It doesn’t hurt to invite them over to your place and provide refreshments so you set things off on the right foot. When they understand who you are, any misunderstandings get settled easier.
Creating Good Relationships with Your Roommates
Sustaining good relationships with your roommates is a given if you’re going to live together for at least a year of your college lives. Vetting is probably the most useful concept there is when sharing your life with someone. Even if you might feel uneasy digging into someone’s background, it doesn’t hurt to investigate a roommate’s history so you know they’re honest.
You don’t want someone who might steal things under your nose or has polar opposite views of your own. Both of these situations could lead to major fights down the road without some vetting.
When you have the right roommates, you’ll nurture relationships that likely go beyond college and into lifelong friendships. It’s also not out of the realm of possibility roommates marry one another since you’ll probably spend more time together than you perhaps did with your own family.
How do you go about nurturing relationships in your apartment community? Let us know about your tips and strategies for maintain relationships.
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19 Comments. Leave new
This is great advice! I have a hard time making friends because I’m shy, but just moved into a new college friendly community so hoping to meet some new people. Thanks!
This is a great place to live in and sharing people whom you will become friends. Finding a new friends is really excited and fun in this new place.
Living with someone is a important decision and its great to be able to develop a relationship with them. Looking for student housing can sometimes be daunting but it wasnt such a problem for me. Luckily i got some helping finding a roommate from my school.
I wish I had an article like this when I was in college. Developing relationships within your community is super important when it’s your first time out and about in the world. Having relationships outside of your romantic ones can also benefit your safety. Kind of goes along with knowing your surroundings. If you establish relationships with your landlord and your neighbors then you can develop a trust. That way you can come to them when you need something or need help.
This is perfect! These are things that I never really thought about when I was starting college. I wish that I had known how important all of these relationship are and how much they can shape your entire college experience. Your roommates are SUPER important, they can be your personal life balance!.
Beginning of college life is a milestone in my life. This is the first time we have to take decisions independently about our social life, managing finance and personal problems. In that case, developing relationship with property managers, neighbors and roommates within apartments is a major issue. The article is very much helpful for the college students. Thanks for the article.
Living in an Apartment with roommates during college life is a feel good experience in the whole life. It is the most important part of the life as we share most of our college memories with them and will come across the values, relationships and know about what the world is all about. Off- campus apartments are well preferred as we being students prefer independence.
When i first was looking for a college apartment I first looked for an areas where I could be myself. A community that felt so safe and like home I think was way more important then just the regular off campus apartments where you can go wild and have no restrictions. I looked for a place where people were all liked minded and could help me grow into an adult that would be ready for the real world. Its often tempting for college students just to go for the cheapest or the most fun. But I say find your place where you can feel proud of, because that will lead to most positively in your life and also the guidelines you need to go from just student living apartments to real life adult apartments when you graduate.
I agree wholeheartedly with the advice in this column. While in college, I maintained a constant flow of communication with my property manager. This enabled me to resolve any related conflicts and solve problems quickly and efficiently. By following all the rules and procedures laid out in our lease, we got along fantastically.
Nice article! I agree that it is important to maintain relationships with the property manager. Speak with your roommates about how to be respectful of your landlord and especially the neighbors! This article has some great advice to make sure everyone will have a positive experience living together and you’ll most likely gain some friends for life. I’m 23 and graduated two years ago and I’m still living with my roommate from freshman year!
I think these are the best tips i have found when it comes to this topic: Creating Good Relationships with Your Roommates. neighbors and the property manager. I will act like this as soon as i start looking for apartments (:
I think that these tips are handy. When I went to college and living in an apartment I had good relationships with roommates and neighbors! Made the experience so much better!
This is a very informative article and helped easy my mind about having my child go away to school and live on campus. Not only does it point out the benefits of making friends and being social but it teaches the tools that will also be needed thoughout life with different housing situations. It is also important to point out that having a community be involved in the support that some need when being away from family and friends can further their success during the stressful years of college.
The part about knowing your roommates and picking good people to room with is huge. I’ve had 8 roommates during college, and I would say they ranged from “great, would room together again” to “terrible, worst experience ever.” The stress of living with someone who doesn’t mash well with you is not something you want.
I’m a former college student, and this article is on point! When I lived in my first apartment, I didn’t know the manager, and I ended up being stranded without power every time a fuse blew. But at my next apartment, I got to know the owner, who was kind and enjoyed our relationship just as much as I did. I had the best college home experience living in an apartment where I had a relationship with the owner.
When I first moved into my first college apartment and got situated, one of the first things I did was meet my neighbors. I was nervous because I know that this person could either be really cool or really horrible. It turns out it was a bunch of college guys that were really cool and are my friends to this very day. So my advice would be to build a relationship with your neighbors because you never know.
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