Finding housing in Santa Monica

For the past several weeks, I’ve been looking for housing in or near Santa Monica. I’m not picky. I’ll take pretty much anything. So that has given me a lot of options. And the fact that I was looking so early seems to have made things harder, because many of the places I looked at were taken before the date I wanted to move in. I want to move in tomorrow, May 29, 2007. It’s a short term deal. I’m just looking to get one room for three months, and I don’t care whether I have a roommate (I somewhat prefer one so that we can split the rent). Here’s where I’ll be going every day:

Somewhere near that spot would be ideal. I’m looking at a number of options, but my backup is to stay with a friend until he moves out with the end of school at UCLA. To do anything else has become a bit more complicated. I follow up with random scattered leads on craigslist (and there are a lot of them), but I can’t help but wonder: is this the best way to do things?

There should be a better way to find housing.

Sublet.com is not free. I assumed it was, and spent some time searching for stuff. Then it asked me for registration, which costs $55 for 90 days of access. Not recommended. Their web search system is really clunky, too.

If you have an idea, please leave a comment.