Subleasing is part of any college town in the summer, including MSU, however, as many students find out, it’s not always an easy process.
While rental companies like DTN Management Company and Community Resource Management Company, assist students and make the sublease official, they leave it up to the student to find someone and negotiate a price.
“We provide all of the services that you need in order to sublease – we advertise it for you, we provide the paperwork for you, we do the collections for you and then we also do the maintenance for your sub-tenant,” said Jeff Wells, the president of CRMC Management.
Wells said that while CRMC does provide all of those services for students, they ask students to find someone to sublease and suggest students should do a background check on the people they find to sublease.
Students have a wide-variety of places they can advertise their rental units for sublease, including MSU-related Facebook pages, Craigslist, bulletin boards around campus, the websites for both DNT and CRMC and more.
Recent alumna Sara Kenez said getting approved for a sublease and filing paperwork was easy, but finding someone is the real challenge.
Kenez said she posted her sublease all over the place, but still had problems finding someone to sublease and agreeing on a price.
“A lot of people seem to be going home, I guess, or are already staying in East Lansing, and the most annoying thing is that you had to drop your price quite a bit to find someone,” Kenez said.
Economics senior Raj Vutukuru,said that the price was a big barrier in trying to find someone to sublease, but that there are other obstacles.
Vutukuru said it is also more difficult to find a subtenant if the subtenant has to share a room.
“People want to kind of have their own room for the summer,” he said.
Kenez had the problem of trying to find someone to share a room with a stranger.
“I would probably start looking earlier, because the room that I was subleasing, I was actually sharing with another girl and the plan was to try and like find two people or one person together that would sublease from us,” Kenez said. “She found a few people, but that fell through. So that process turned into her just finding her own subleaser and then I was kind of left to try and find someone who would be willing to share a room with a stranger, so that was pretty difficult.”
