T-Minus 247 Days: Renting a Florida House

 There is the real possibility that we might have to rent a house when we get to Florida. The possibility that our house will sell in such a way that some house in Florida is ready for us to immediatly move into is very unlikely. We may be able to use a short-term rental from HomeAway.com or, need something a bit longer term from Appartments.com . I decided to check the availability of longer term rentals from Apartments.com to understand the options and inventory.

It is important to note that apartments in the Orlando area are often advertised and rented during the same day. They rarely sit open for very long. Therefore, you are likely to find vastly different results when searching one day to the next. It also means that once you find something you like, you need to move very fast. Most of the houses are listed by how many hours they have been on the site, not how many days.

Our search: we need a four+ bedroom pool house that is dog friendly. On this day, there are only 17 available rentals, a third of which are over priced. 

Eighty percent of the houses are not furnished, which means we'll probably have to move our furniture into the house temporarily. Moving washers, dryers, couches, and everything else into a house is a lot of work and a huge pain. Alternatively, if the house was furnished then we have to pay PODS to store our stuff for a longer period of time, which can get expensive. We could unload everything into the garage only to re-pack it all back up later on... but what a huge pain that would be!

Bottom line: I hope we don't have to do a rental. But if we do, there are not a lot of options and we would have to move fast to secure something if needed.