Welcome to ApartmentPedia™ -- The Apartment Encyclopedia

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To create the most complete and definitive source of information about the past and present of Apartments.

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To be your source for Apartment related information. We will supply our visitors with up to date news, stories, and latest Apartment News Links section below.

Apartment News Links:
Tasty Dorm Food Made Easy
25 Jul 2008 at 1:46pm
Remember when dorm food meant cooking on a hot plate? Times have changed. At many colleges, school-s...
Crete baby death: Mother accused of killing collapses in court
25 Jul 2008 at 1:27pm
The British mother who is accused of killing her newborn baby in a Greek holiday apartment dramatica...
ECONOMY: Housing heads to new lows
25 Jul 2008 at 1:26pm
The Las Vegas housing market is flying close to the bottom but giving mixed signals as to where the ...
Green on the Inside: Eco Consulting For Your SpaceBoston
25 Jul 2008 at 1:23pm
Does Apartment Therapy's July theme of "Green @ Home" have you finally thinking about how to eco-fy ...
Close-Up: A Country-Style City Terrace Garden Paris, France
25 Jul 2008 at 1:22pm
FranA ois and RaphaA lle spent a year and a half looking for an apartment with a private terrace, fi...

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Apartment:
An apartment is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building. Apartments may be owned (by an owner-occupier) or rented (by tenants).

The term "apartment" is favored in North America, whereas the term "flat" is sometimes, but not exclusively, used in the United Kingdom and most other English-speaking areas and Commonwealth nations.

Some apartment-dwellers own their own cacaitas apartments, either as co-ops, in which the residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or in condominiums, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment connotes a residential unit or section in a building. Apartment building owners, lessors, or managers often use the more general word units to refer to apartments. Units can be used to refer to rental business suites as well as residential apartments. When there is no tenant occupying an apartment, the lessor is said to have a vacancy.

Upmarket apartments in Bristol, EnglandFor apartment lessors, each vacancy represents a loss of income from rent-paying tenants for the time the apartment is vacant (i.e., unoccupied). Lessors' objectives are often to minimize the vacancy rate for their units. The owner of the apartment typically when transferring possession to the occupant(s) gives him/her the key to the apartment entrance door(s) and any other keys needed to live there, such as a common key to the building or any other common areas, and an individual unit mailbox key. When the occupant(s) move out, these keys are typically returned to the owner.

Apartments can be classified into several types. One is a Studio, efficiency, bedsit, or bachelor style apartment. These all tend to be the smallest apartments with the cheapest rents in a given area. These kinds of apartment usually consist mainly of a large room which is the living, dining, and bedroom combined. There are usually kitchen facilities as part of this central room, but the bathroom is its own smaller separate room.

Moving up from the efficiencies are one-bedroom apartments where one bedroom is a separate room from the rest of the apartment. Then there are two-bedroom, three-bedroom, etc. apartments. Small apartments often have only one entrance/exit.

Large apartments often have two entrances/exits, perhaps a door in the front and another in the back. Depending on the building design, the entrance/exit doors may be directly to the outside or to a common area inside, such as a hallway. Depending on location, apartments may be available for rent furnished with furniture or unfurnished into which a tenant usually moves in with their own furniture. A garden apartment has some characteristics of a townhouse: each apartment has its own entrance, and apartments are not placed vertically over one another. However, a garden apartment is usually only one story high and never more than two stories; they are often one-bedrooms and almost never more than two-bedrooms. Some garden apartment buildings place a one-car garage under each apartment, with pedestrian entrances from a common courtyard open at one end. The grounds are more landscaped than for other modestly scaled apartments. (Alternately, "garden apartment" can refer to a unit built half below grade, putting its windows at garden level.

In some parts of the world, the word apartment refers to a new purpose-built self-contained residential unit in a building, whereas the word flat means a converted self-contained unit in an older building. An industrial, warehouse, or commercial space converted to an apartment is commonly called a loft.

An apartment in the Philippines.When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of a landlord's family member, the unit may be known as an in-law apartment or granny flat, though these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters rather than family members. In Canada these suites are commonly located in the basements of houses and are therefore normally called basement suites or "mother-in-law suites."

In Milwaukee vernacular architecture, a "Polish flat" is an existing small house or cottage that has been lifted up to accommodate the creation of a new basement floor housing a separate apartment, then set down again; thus becoming a modest two-story flat.

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