Chelsea Lee did not find a student to sublease her apartment until just a few weeks before leaving to study abroad in Spain last month. In crunch mode, Lee, senior in LAS, was desperate to find a sublease to alleviate the expenses of studying abroad while also paying for an apartment in Illinois.

Subleasing online can lead to a lot of scams. However, certain strategies on social media and learning what sites to use can help apartment hunters avoid scams and find people to sublease.

To sublease her apartment, Lee used Facebook and Craigslist. On Facebook there is an open group specifically for University students looking to sublease. On Monday alone, there were 21 postings from people looking to sublease apartments.

The postings vary in descriptions about the apartments. The most successful postings, including Lee’s, should list information such as location, nearby bus stops, utilities included in rent, parking and the furniture that comes with the apartment. Lee even included pictures.

By reposting listings many times on Facebook and Craigslist, the listing will appear day-to-day so that new people searching for subleases can view them. Lee followed a similar pattern, and her persistence resulted in a lot of responses. However, not all of the responses were reliable or as persistent as Lee was.

At one point, Lee had a man say he was interested in her apartment. On the day they were supposed to sign the lease together, he did not show up. Lee tried calling and emailing him, but she never got a response.

Lee then contacted a woman who had expressed interest in her apartment but wanted to negotiate the price. Negotiations led to Lee subleasing her apartment, but it also resulted in Lee paying for a month’s rent when she would be in Spain. Also, the person did not want to sublease for the summer months.

“We negotiated and, honestly, I thought it was kind of unfair at my end, but my leasing office found someone to sublease my apartment for the summer,” Lee said.

Not many students are as lucky as Lee in finding someone to cover her summer rent, too. The campus Tenant Union says that subleasing for the summer “will be most difficult as many students are looking for someone to sublet from them in the summer with very few students left to do so. Consider making your rent price negotiable.” 

While the Tenant Union does not list subleases on its website, it does provide resources where students can list and find subleases available, such as Craigslist, the UIUC study abroad housing board and The Daily Illini classified section.

While The Daily Illini charges for sublease ads, Craigslist and the study abroad housing board are free. Of course, the study abroad housing board is targeted toward university students. One of the goals of the study abroad housing board is to help alleviate the stress of finding a sublease when going abroad and to help students avoid scams.

Cristina Valdez, junior in LAS, is a peer advisor at the Study Abroad Office. She has met lots of students who want to find ways to make their subleases available to international students. Many of the students who come to talk to Valdez express the same fears as Lee, saying they will not be able to study abroad if they do not find a sublease.

To ease their worries, Valdez shows these students the study abroad housing board online.

“The board is accessible to incoming exchange students and people studying abroad,” Valdez said. “A lot of time that’s where international students find their housing because they know we’re a trusted source.”

The housing board aims to help students escape scams, especially if they are from a foreign country and are not familiar with housing systems on campus.

“Sometimes we’ve had people come into the office where they pre-sign leases without knowing what they’re getting,” Valdez said. “There have been students who have been scammed before, not from our housing board, but from their own searches.”

Even Lee encountered scams on Craigslist when looking for people to sublease her apartment. The Federal Trade Commission has some tips on how to spot a scam. Signs include posters asking you to wire money, wanting a security deposit before you have seen the apartment and the poster saying they are out of town and unable to meet before signing the sublease. 

Knowing how to look for scams and using trustworthy sources like the housing board helps to make subleasing easier. Being transparent in listings is a big part in not coming across as a scam.

Lee figured out these tricks to subleasing. Now, she is studying abroad in Spain and planning to go to Paris for Valentine’s Day, free of subleasing worries.

Rebecca is a junior in Media. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @ruthyjacobs.