WOOHOO! It's time for a change – and not just seasonal! We are moving cross country and rental house hunting on the West Coast and I'm really excited about it! I'll finally be on the same time zone as most of my friends and family. YAY!
Of course, with big moves come big needs, big concerns, and big headaches. Fortunately, there are a LOT of great resources to help make the job easier and I'm looking forward to sharing all I find with you over the next few posts. And YES! We'd LOVE to hear your suggestions as well!
Today? I have some great apps and other resources to help us find rental homes. Even if we are eventually planning to buy a new house, it can be a good idea to rent first and get to know the “lay of the land.” The first time we moved a few hundred miles away, we rented an apartment for six months. That gave us time to get to know a bit about the different areas and figure out where we wanted to focus our house-hunting search at.
With this current move, I checked the newspaper but was shocked to find how few rental home ads were there. Fortunately I was able to rely on several excellent resources including:
SMART PHONE APPS (in my case – iPhone)
- Zillow – Did you know the Zillow app includes rentals as well as homes for sale? You can go directly to their site or use their app, which I did. The app allowed me to search the specific areas I wanted. It was also useful for researching a house when I spotted a FOR RENT sign while driving around. I could sometimes type the address right into the app. If that didn't bring up the correct info, I would then go to Google, type in the words – address AND rent AND Zillow – with “address” being the actual address, of course. That would usually cause the property page to pop up. Very handy!
- Trulia – Trulia's app also includes rentals as well as homes for sale. It seemed a bit harder to use but I did keep it. Sometimes it would give me information the other apps didn't.
- Craigslist – I tried a couple of apps for Craigslist, including paid ones, but in the end I preferred using my iPhone to go directly to the site.
- For Rent – We were specifically looking for a house. If I had switched to apartment hunting, I would have downloaded theirs to give it a try. {It's not showing up in the apps store anymore – at least, not for iphone. I'm not sure if they quit using it or if they stopped it due to Corona Virus issues. So if you are reading this AFTER things calm down and life is back to normal from the quarantines, etc. try looking them up in the apps store. 🙂
As I drove around the areas I was focusing on, I noticed repeats of several property manager signs. I started downloading their website, going to the rental section of their site, and saving that page to my iPhone. I put each of these and the above apps into a “property hunt” file folder. This gave me an easy resource to check for daily updates.
Yes! I finally found a house to match the most important of our long list of needs and wants. And all of these apps kept me on task and on target until I finally found just what we needed for our new home.
Now, it's your turn. What phone apps or other resources would you suggest when hunting for a new rental home?
P.S. Don't forget to do your “due diligence” when hunting, especially when using Craigslist. Try not to meet at a home in the dark if it's with a stranger. For that matter, it's always wise to take someone with you AND leave your name and info where you'll be at with someone else. And share that info casually. I would also suggest checking property managers with BBB.org.
