One Thing We Can Do Today to Help Galesburg Grow

It's free and could actually have an effect

As stated in my previous post I believe we need to get more people to move to Galesburg as a way to improve our town. What would be a first step towards making that happen? What would be the very least we can do to attract more people?

When I started writing this article if you went onto Apartments.com and searched for apartments in Galesburg IL, there wasn’t much to see. It showed 9 available apartments in town between 5 locations. Upon further inspection one property was actually in Oneida. Two didn't list any availability or pricing. That left two properties with availability, pricing information, and listings on the website. One of those two ended up being for Section 8 senior housing. That left one listing with potential for anyone younger than a Senior to rent.

Since then there have been more listings added, but that was not a good showing. While there are some landlords who are posting their apartments broadly, there seem to be many who are not. They may be listing them in the private Facebook group “Galesburg Illinois Houses For Sale or Rent” but not everyone knows to look there or has access.

With listing numbers like I saw it would give someone from out of town the impression that there are very few apartments available. Those of us that live here all know there are more apartments available than listed online. There are many apartments, houses, and apartments *in* houses to rent throughout town, but you have to find them. If we really want people to move here, why don’t we make it easier for people who aren’t from here to find an apartment?

If you are looking to move here and buy a house immediately, then it’s no issue. There are numerous real estate websites that have plentiful pictures and information of all the for sale houses online. It’s as easy for a local to see this info as it is for anyone across the state, country, or world. On Zillow, the most popular real estate website, there are 77 listings for houses in Galesburg when I last checked. 

Not only do we post our houses online but we post our jobs as well. The hope is that anyone who may want to work the job sees it and has an opportunity to apply. While business leaders may prefer to hire locals, they widen their search if they can’t find anyone. At the end of the day businesses need to move forward. When I last checked Indeed, the largest online job site, there were 571 job listings within a 10 mile radius of town. 

So to recap there are 77 houses, 571 jobs, but a few apartment listings of varying quality. Why can’t we post our rental units online as well?

People need to know there is space for them

When growing our town all people are important, but one of the most important categories of people to attract is young people. Young people have almost all of their prime working years ahead of them to be productive members of our town. And if they like it enough they may settle their roots here, start a family or a business or just keep working, and the community is better for it.

Young people like to look at apartments online before they move somewhere. I did it when I changed apartments numerous times in my early twenties. When I moved to Galesburg it was different though, because I moved back in with my parents at first. But if I hadn’t been able to move in with my parents I may have been more hesitant to move back because of the lack of online apartment listings. If I had really wanted an apartment I could’ve worked my connections with friends and family, but what about those that don’t have those connections? 

I’ve heard stories from friends who moved from out of town on how hard it is to find a suitable place to rent. What about the people who aren’t as motivated to find an apartment? We should want to fill all of our apartments, no matter how undetermined the renter is. People like to have options, and people can be discouraged easily.

But I suspect there is a major reason that we don’t have a ton of listings: because it’s not something all of our landlords are used to doing. It’s something new to learn, and most of our landlords are small timers that have other full time jobs. There may also be a lingering sense of “who is moving into an apartment in Galesburg from out of town?” And I’m not here to shame landlords, I’m here to move forward together.

If you search Apartments.com for cities like Champaign or Chicago you’ll see hundreds or thousands of listings. While there are many, many apartments in those towns and they’re listed online to try and make sure their units are filled. They’ll include many pictures, list all amenities in the apartment, the complex, and the surrounding area. Some of them will even have a 3D tour you can go on through the entire apartment without ever setting foot in it. We need this for the apartments in Galesburg!

But I’ve heard that local apartment owners may wait to find “the right people” for their apartments, preferring to get tenants from word of mouth than from applications. But again if we want people to move to town from the outside, we need it to be more open for outsiders to apply for the apartments we have. It should be in the interest of landlords for more people to move here because if there are more people competing for the same apartments then they could charge more in rent. And if it turns out we already rent almost every apartment we have, we will need to build more which is a different conversation.

So as a low-cost, immediate solution to possibly attract more people to town we need to try and get every available apartment listed online. This way

out of towners potentially looking to move here can see we have apartments available. Most people wanting to move here aren’t initially going to buy a house, they rent an apartment or house. And if someone is trying to decide between places to move for a job or some other reason, they may lean towards somewhere they can more easily find housing. This isn’t a silver bullet, but this is now the standard in the modern world. Our apartments need to be listed online.

An Offer

As a way to help this town and to show I’m really serious about growth: any landlord who has a unit for rent that they want to list online, I will come take pictures of your empty units and help set up an apartments.com page. I want your units filled, and if you do too email me at erthely@gmail.com