Even with tools to automate the search through listings and get you ahead of other buyers, one of the tricky parts of apartment hunting is its “optimal stopping” structure: you have to decide when to commit without knowing whether an even better apartment might be out there.

This is a famous math problem (the “secretary problem”) with the lovely solution that you should define a time interval over which to search and not commit to anything until you’ve spent 1/e of that time -- 37% -- noncommittally exploring your options.

https://medium.com/galleys/optimal-stopping-45c54da6d8d0#.lj...