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An Auburn man found an apartment in coastal Maine through a Facebook comment, ending a weeks-long search.
Ellis David Perry, 34, moved into his new apartment in Belfast last week, ending a search in which he applied for 15 apartments in the area and scheduled showings for seven.
He never heard a response from the other eight units, which required him to complete applications that called for “an extreme amount of personal information,” such as social security number, employment verification and previous addresses, he said.
Perry wrote about his experience in the “Belfast Maine Complaints Department” Facebook page last week to voice his frustration. That post garnered more than 500 likes and roughly 340 comments, many of which were from people sharing similar stories or looking to help him find a home.
Perry’s experience, and the deluge of engagement on Facebook, illustrate how complicated it can be for people to find somewhere to live due to limited inventory and strict screening process for renting them, especially in Maine’s idyllic coastal areas.
This could ultimately hurt the region’s economy and worsen Maine’s labor shortage, as people need to be able to live near where they work, Perry said.
Eric Sanders, Belfast’s City Council chairperson, said that while rent prices have spiked in recent years, he believes there are still apartments available. This is helped by the handful of housing projects Belfast has welcomed in the past five years that added dozens of apartments to the city, he said.
“Everyone wants to move to Belfast, and for that I am grateful,” Sanders said.
In addition to the arduous application process, Perry was also disappointed to see how many homes in Belfast are short-term rentals rather than serving as someone’s home. He compared the low requirements landlords place on those looking to rent a home for a few weeks or months with someone needing a year-long lease.
“It’s an egregious double standard that damages the local community because working people can’t find a place to live as easily as anyone from elsewhere who’s just here to have fun for the summer,” Perry said.
Sanders pointed to a survey that was completed within the past year that “indicated that the actual number of [short term rentals] was minor compared to what people had assumed.”
Airbnb had nearly 100 homes in the Belfast area that can be rented for a short period of time while Zillow showed only 11 units available for rent in the city as of Wednesday.
Originally from Auburn, Perry went to trade school and college on the west coast, then lived in Los Angeles for 10 years after graduating.
Perry worked as a leasing agent in Los Angeles after losing his jobs when the pandemic began in March 2020. That job gave him a close look at the trend of people fleeing Los Angeles during the pandemic while new residents moved from across the world to take their place, he said.
“That was my first exposure to how housing availability impacts a place,” Perry said.
Perry decided to move back to Maine this past summer after buying a property in the Belfast area where he hopes to build a house. This, he said, will give him security that he didn’t have in Los Angeles, where rental housing “always felt extremely precarious.”
Perry also has a real estate license and wants to help Mainers buy homes, he said.
He ultimately found a place to live thanks to one comment on his Facebook post, which mentioned a “for rent” sign someone had seen at a Belfast intersection.
“I drove over there and called the number and the landlord was fixing up the apartment at that moment,” Perry said. “I went in, I looked at it, she shook my hand and I moved in the next day. It was really that easy.”