Katie Warriner was lucky — she only looked at 10 places before she found somewhere to live. Of course, she e-mailed in response to 50 other classified ads, mostly placed on such Web sites as craigslist.org.

“When I would go check my e-mail, I just got in the habit of seeing whether new postings were put up,” said Warriner, 22, a graduate student at The George Washington University.

Current housing market conditions hit students and young professionals especially hard, said James Womack, executive director of the Greater Washington Mutual Housing Association. People currently in one-bedrooms and efficiencies can’t afford to move up, and gas prices are forcing young professionals to seek housing near public transportation.

“They’re going to have to go into housing that they perhaps would not want to go into,” Womack said.

Lisa Swan, a part-time graduate student at Georgetown, has relatively few criteria: a group house with roommates in their 20s in a safe neighborhood close to the Metro. After five open houses, however, she’s still scanning craigslist.org several times a day. “I’ve learned the hard way that you need to be the first person to respond in order to get a place, because I’ve looked at a couple that would have worked fine but both times they decided to go on a first-come, first-serve basis,” said Swan, 21. “If you let it sit there for 20 minutes, 200 people can respond in those 20 minutes.”