With the spring semester and study abroad season underway, some students scramble to sublet their lease. Social media apps such as Facebook are flooded with posts claiming that their sublease is the best.
Some students secured a successful sublease after a few months of searching, while others were left to continue to pay rent for an empty apartment.
Sophomore computer science major Shiv Patel had a successful sublease last summer and is looking to sublease again. The first time, it took him one to two months to find someone to take over his lease.
“Well, the first thing was that I wasn’t consistently reposting what I had, I would just post in one group and then just expect people to reach out to me,” Patel said.
Patel has gotten multiple responses for his current lease within two to three days. “It was much more efficient to post on Facebook groups than Facebook marketplace,” Patel said.
“And even if it’s the same post, just go out of your way to copy and paste it and just consistently keep doing that maybe once or twice a week,” Patel said. “And you’ll probably just be flooded with a bunch of different requests.”
It may have been helpful that Patel added flexibility to the moving date, he said. It is also a matter of how you style your posts, according to Patel.
“The main thing I would say is it’s definitely better to personalize it in the sense that, try to take as many pictures as possible,” Patel said. “Otherwise, it’s just another post that says ‘this is my room with this much money.’”
[The Diamondback’s Spring 2023 Housing Guide]
Senior aerospace engineering major Adiat Muyeen found someone to sublease his apartment at Tempo-College Park after four months.
“So here’s the thing, if you want to sublease for the spring semester, you gotta do it at the end of the fall semester or during the beginning of winter break for sure,” Muyeen said.
Muyeen had to cut down the price of his apartment by about 30 percent. You can save more money and time if you cut down price offerings earlier, he said.
“I think a lot of students just look for prices around $800, $900 [a month], but you have to get lucky to find someone who wants it over $1000, most of the time,” Muyeen said.
People are more willing to reach out regarding a sublease if the price is negotiable, he said.
Senior architecture major Isabel Anderson found someone to sublease her apartment through a personal connection with one of her roommates. She advises people to find subleases through word of mouth.
“So if you put it out there, verbally as well, I think maybe connections can be made like that, instead of just having to rely on sending messages and posting,” Anderson said.
However, some students were unsuccessful in finding someone to sublet their lease.
Senior architecture major Stephen Duranske couldn’t find anyone to sublet his lease at South Campus Commons before studying abroad in the fall semester. Duranske used a housing portal and contact list from Commons.
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“With the listing I put out there, I had a lot of people contact me who wouldn’t be allowed to lease it because they are grad students or Commons has restrictions on housing by gender,” Duranske said.
Posting specific information on your housing profile can help weed out certain people before they contact you, Duranke said.
Duranske advised that students should start looking to sublease their apartments halfway through the prior semester they want to sublease.
Students continue to use Facebook groups such as Housing, Sublets & Roommates in College Park, Maryland and University of Maryland (UMD) Housing and Sublease Community to find potential sublease opportunities.
