If you are looking for an apartment to rent in Raleigh, North Carolina, but have bad credit, a broken previous lease, bankruptcy, or even a felony or misdemeanor, you may very well be denied. This is the frustration faced by many people proposing to search for an apartment in North Carolina’s largest city without a good credit rating or rental history. In recent decades, apartment complexes have tightened their qualification requirements for new tenants and are not insisting on near-perfect credit before processing an approval.

Just because you have poor credit or troubled rental history doesn’t automatically mean that every apartment in Raleigh will disapprove of you; but it does mean that things will be more difficult for you in finding an accommodating leasing manager. You may have to search longer and longer and many applicants in this category actually end up giving up. If you’re in Raleigh and looking for decent apartments, but your credit isn’t as flattering, here are some places to look:

As we mentioned, if you search diligently enough, there will be an apartment or two that will be willing to work with you. These are generally called “second chance apartments” and exist throughout the city, but they are difficult to find mainly because they are not advertised. Their unwillingness to advertise is solely because they want to maintain their reputation as safe housing communities accepting only the highest quality applicants.

One way to find these types of apartments is to use the Internet. The net has many search results if you are looking for bad credit apartments in Raleigh. Again, you may have to go beyond a casual search and dig deep. Apartment locators can be helpful too, especially these days when most of them don’t charge anything to help you locate an accommodation unit. They may know of a place or two where there is a good chance of being approved.

Remember also that even if you find an apartment that agrees to work with you, there will be basic requirements to meet. One of them is that you must have a job for at least 6 months. Your income must also be 3 or more times higher than your rent and eventually you may be asked to succumb to a background check to see if there are serious felonies on your record.