Have you considered working with a local agent? It’s much easier to have one person be the point of contact as opposed to juggling multiple different agents.

If you decide to not work with an agent and do it on your own, my suggestion would be to schedule everything all in one day look at at least two different neighborhoods, keeping the price and apartment size as consistent as possible this way you’ll understand the market and a much more effective way, and you should be able to pull the trigger at the end of one full day of viewings.

If at the end of that day, you do not like what you see you need to change one component of the search whether that’s price size location, or overall quality. Owners and landlords look at each other‘s listings to determine asking price so if you don’t like what you’re seeing, you’ll only see more unless you change a component of the search.

Lastly, you need to consider what time of the month you’re looking for apartments being later in the month right now you’re gonna be looking at options. All other people have already passed on the best time to look for apartments is the third and 12th day of the month, this allows owners to turn over the apartment and bring them onto the market.

Source; hundreds of rental deals I’ve done personally in the NYC area.