Securing Housing From Out of Town

[OregonGal]

Woo OR! If you have any questions about Portland/Eugene don't hesitate to ask... if you're going to OSU, I'm sorry

I would suggest focusing your search in June/early July. A lot of places that come up are looking for someone to move in pretty quickly, so if you look in May a lot of people might come back with "sorry we're looking for a June move-in date".

[BRHM11]

thanks, OregonGal. fortunately it's the UO for me. I'll message you with any questions!

[OregonGal]

Yep! I went to UO for undergrad so my knowledge of Eugene is a couple years old, but should still be relevant

[DJLamar]

To put my two cents in, these are the primary concerns you might face with this process and how to make things easier:

1) You want to not get scammed by fake listings or other people that could take your money and run. Going with a sort of housing "company" or big, well-known landlord can give you more assurance about this. Many will have a website or will have listings on Google etc. with reviews, or people in the department you're going to might know them, so you can know ahead of time that they're legitimate. Sublets or dealings with individuals can work out well too though. Just make sure to collect enough little pieces of information about the person that you can verify their identity (especially in the case of sublets) -- enough to be able to track them down if they were to disappear with their money, like a legitimate Facebook link, an academic/professional/personal website, some verification of their workplace, non-edited looking photo of them with their driver's license, or whatever. If you have information like that then it would be foolish for them to disappear beyond that point. A lease or written sublease agreement can help that sense of security too.

2) You want the apartment to be good on the inside after you secure a place and move in. Email or call and ask for photos of the apartment's interior. If the landlord doesn't have any on hand (this happens, even with good landlords offering good apartments), see if you can get someone in your new school's department to go visit for you and take photos (offer them money like someone here did).

3) You want the apartment to be good on the outside as well, i.e. good neighborhood and location. Grad students at your new school can of course be a big help for this. There's also an extremely useful City Guide forum on this site which has Q/A topics for many cities, with big archives of posts. Search for your city and make sure there's not a topic for it already before posting a new one -- even some pretty small towns have lots of info already. For bigger cities, I guess an additional useful resource could actually just be travel guides like wikitravel.org, since they'll probably talk about which places are safe, which are fun, etc. Of course you want a place which is a good location for you (perhaps with respect to your school, perhaps with respect to restaurants and bars) and which is safe. However, don't forget other factors like the character of the neighborhood -- for example, lots of colleges (especially in small college towns) have "undergrad ghettos" which are very close to the campus and sometimes/often very safe as well, but are noisy as hell with rowdy frat boys partying all night Thursday through Sunday.

That's all I have to say. Good luck moving. I'm looking for a sublet for the Summer from afar (albeit a place I lived in another Summer which I already know well) with a tough market. It's fairly frustrating...

[OregonGal]

Also, and this is complete supposition based on what I'm thinking about doing... but there are a LOT of us who are moving a ways for our degree programs. I know that I'll have a decent sized room in a 3-bed 2-bath apartment with cool roommates opening up, so why not post it in the DC thread in June or July? Best case scenario, it saves a lot of hassle on both ends. Hopefully enough people will think about doing the same to make life easier for a lot of people on the forum

[lydibird]

Right now I'm in the same situation. With my work schedule and travel costs there is no way I can make it out to apartment hunt!

I'm with all the people that contacted others already living there to help them out. I wanted a roommate, so I contacted a group affiliated with my church (I imagine that any sort of national/international organization/group/club with a chapter where you're moving would be willing to help you out!) to help me find a roommate. They got me in contact with a grad student going into her second year who was looking for a roommate and we're working together to find an apartment that will suit us both. Since she's already living there she can check apartments out in person and make sure they're livable. We haven't settled on anything yet, but we haven't been in contact long. Since I found my roommate through an organization I trust I'm not as wary about the potential crazy roommate as I would be if I answered a craigslist ad.

I'm still a little wary, mind you, but I'm pretty sure she won't kill me in my sleep or anything.