PCS tips and trick’s part 1 - home search
So as many of you know by now, we are a military family, and we move frequently! This year we moved from Hunter Army Airfield, in Savannah, GA to a base in Virginia. And like other military families, not without struggle this year in particular. PCSing right now has presented many new challenges that we haven’t experienced in past moves. Things like moving companies experiencing labor and driver shortages and gas prices skyrocketing and the military reimbursement process for that not catching up to increased costs, to name a few. With all of that our original PCS plan was:
To report 30 days early to my spouse’s new duty station
Find a rental home within our 10-day window of reimbursable hotel nights
Get our household goods delivered
Use remaining time to go on vacation and see family
Andddddd the only part of our plan that went accordingly was reporting 30 days early, that’s it just number 1 on our list.
On base housing did not have anything available for us when we arrived, despite being on the waitlist for months ahead of time, so we went to look for a rental home off base. If you’ve done this before you know there’s NO good way to go about this. You can work with a realtor but if you’re not looking to buy a home and they’re not marketing a specific rental home they manage they are usually less than enthusiastic to assist. Here’s a list of tips we found helpful in our search…
Tips for finding a rental home in 2022:
Search through or ask in your community Facebook groups to see if any realtors have apps you can use to search the MLS yourself.
In my opinion this is the first route to go and is GREAT except not all rentals get posted on the MLS from what we found
If you’re moving to Virginia and would like to access the app I used for your own home search it can be found in the app store under: Liz Moore Home SearchSearch rental sites to include: Redfin, Zumper, and Zillow
Anytime I found a rental on these sites, even if it didn’t meet our needs, I would google the realtor who posted it to then find their companies site with additional rentals listed privately on their pagesDrive around looking for rental signs posted in our local area
This didn’t help us much, so I wouldn’t recommend wasting the gas until prices go back down
Changes in the rental market to be aware of:
Property managers are expecting you to submit an application prior to reaching out to them to view the property
This was by far the most shocking and frustrating part of our home search. In prior moves, we have NEVER been expected to pay and submit an application on a property without viewing it first. I would say 9/10 property managers we inquired to about listings would first ask us if we had applied, if we could even get them to answer the phone. It is a very backwards process as the obvious risk is usually a non-refundable application fee that you may risk losing if multiple people are applying to the same home, but I can see how property managers are taking advantage of this trend in the current real estate market.Watch out for new scams
A new scam we came across this PCS was companies asking you to download an app and pay a .99 cent fee to get a code to view the home by yourself. I thought this was odd, but we started to become desperate looking for homes and one we had written off because of this odd .99 cent fee we finally paid, viewed the home, and submitted an application on. After doing so and submitting all our personal information, to include pay stubs for my spouse that shows he’s employed by the Department of Defense, they came back to say they couldn’t verify his employment and because of that they couldn’t approve our application. So out $100 application fee and now they have all of our information. So all that to say just be careful who you’re providing info too and if something doesn’t feel right, even if its just .99 cents don’t move forward.
And after all of that…
We still weren’t able to find a rental home that fit within our BAH limit, max distance to my spouse’s job, and in a safe location. We searched for weeks. So much so that after our 10 nights of reimbursable hotel nights ended, myself and the kids went to live with my in-laws while my spouse continued to search for a home in VA for us. Because let’s be real, a family of 4, two of which are children under the age of 3, in a single hotel room with no end date DOES NOT WORK.
Once all the dust settled, we landed on a 3-bedroom apt with a storage unit, at our max BAH rate. While we’re not super thrilled about being back in an apt, the perks during the summer months like the pool and the playground are making the transition easier.
