Many Penn students can't wait to live off-campus after their freshman year. However, with this new freedom comes the added responsibility of finding subletters for the summer.
Finding a subletter is not necessarily an easy task -- and when students do find one, they usually can only charge significantly less than the rent that they are paying.
According to College junior Jimmy Fairbanks, it's still difficult to find subletters despite these reduced rates because students staying over the summer have so many different options to choose from. As a result, subletters tend to be friends or acquaintances of the people they are renting from.
"My roommate was able to find a subletter through a friend of a friend," Fairbanks said.
"They probably were only paying about half of the rent," he added.
Though there are an abundance of choices for subletters during the summer months, it isn't that easy to find a place in the middle of the year.
According to College sophomore Tom Vierbuchen, "It's only easy to find a subletter if you know people." He added that he got lucky because he had a friend who needed to rent a place from June through August. "Otherwise I would have had to put up flyers," Vierbuchen said.
Friends and flyers aside, there are alternative means to finding a subletter.
College senior Emily Previti didn't have any problems finding a subletter thanks to an ad she placed in The Daily Pennsylvanian's summer subletting guide.
But she did face several other issues that inevitably arise when dealing with subletters.
"The people who leased the house were really bad about paying utilities," Previti said of the five people who subletted the house from her and her roommates.
Consequently, she was forced to call and remind the subletters to pay at the end of each month.
Subletting also poses a variety of logistical problems. Though most leases don't specifically prevent subletting, tenants are often charged a fee for doing so. And in some cases, landlords don't allow the practice at all.
Previti was one of these students whose lease stipulated that she could not sublet her room to anyone. However, not wanting to spend her summer at Penn, she found a way around this situation. Previti had the subletters mail the checks directly to her and then paid the monthly bills herself as if she were actually living there. The landlord, apparently, never knew the difference.
Though Previti didn't encounter any further complications, she did have to go through the extra effort of dealing with the subletters on a personal basis.
Her main responsibility was making sure that they paid her each month. However, she was also liable for any damage to the house. In the event that there had been damages, the repair fees would have been taken out of her security deposit.
Fortunately, she found the house relatively intact when she came back to school in September -- aside from a small rodent problem that had developed because the temporary tenants "left food everywhere."
