This is an advert for a long term apartment share in a great location, especially for the Stanford campus (College Avenue near Cal Ave Station, Palo Alto):

• 6 min cycle (15 min walk) to Stanford campus;
• 4 min walk to Cal Ave Caltrain station - handy for trips up to San Francisco etc;
• 2 min walk to California Avenue (shops, restaurants, and Sunday farmer's market).
• 10 min cycle along the bicycle boulevard to Palo Alto Downtown (more shops, restaurants, cinema etc)

The apartment and your room
The apartment has two fairly large bedrooms, a shared bathroom (with bath plus shower), large shared living space, and a shared kitchen. Your bedroom has a street and flowers view, it is currently fully furnished and you may purchase items from the room if you like or we can remove it. The remainder of the flat is also fully furnished (dining table, couch etc). If you have your own furniture for these shared areas you're welcome to bring them - but we should probably chat about it first so we don't end up with a million couches. The kitchen has plenty of stuff: pots and pans, cutlery, plates etc etc, which you are welcome to use - or bring your own. There are all the usual appliances (fridge, oven, electric hob, toaster, rice cooker, kettle, blender) which do their jobs admirably.

House mate
You would be sharing the apartment with me, Akshara, I work on behaviour research at the Med School. I moved to California over 1 year ago. I'm pretty easy going - if you want to hang out sometimes and have tea / watch a film, whatever, then that's good by me - if you just want your own space, that's fine too. I like to keep things reasonably clean and tidy so it would be good to share with someone who's prepared to pitch in on that - but I'm not insane about it.

Contract
The rent is very good for the area! If you decide to move in, you and I would sign a new contract together with the landlord so we would have shared responsibility for the apartment. We both pay $1440 a month. The nice thing is its a rolling monthly contract - so if you decide to move out for whatever reason, you just have to give one months notice.

Utilities (Gas, internet etc) are usually in the $60-80 range.

The landlord will require you to fill out an application form and will require 1/2 of the first month's rent and 1/2 of the last month's rent, plus a security deposit of $175.00.

Move-in date
The current housemate you would be replacing is planning to move out sometime by August 31st so we can negotiate a bit on the actual move-in date.

Landlord requirements
The landlord has asked me to pass on the following requirements:

• you must have a steady job or be a student
• excellent credit (note: if you're from abroad you might not have a credit rating in the US yet. This probably won't be an issue - it wasn't for me).
• excellent references
• can pay the monthly rent
• must be a non smoker
• no pets

There's extra outside storage space if you happen to be hauling a bunch of stuff around with you.

Onsite washer and dryer.

Arranging a viewing
If you're interested, I'm sure you would like to come and have a look at the place and meet me, and I'd like to meet you too. If you're free next week or this weekend, that would be a good time to come and look around. If you can't make it then feel free to get in touch anyway and we can figure something else out.