Housing Waitlist Question

[Jolie717]

Ok - as a wife and mom, I realize I am not a "typical" grad student.  That said, for those of you out there that are similar to me who are relocating, how are you navigativing housing wait lists?  Is it best to find an off-campus place, plop down a deposit, and then lose it if you finally get a housing offer late in the game?  Do off-campus places penalize even further if you drop them, like if they can't re-lease soon enough?  This is all new to me - so please forgive me!  

I talked to the housing dept at one of my schools yesterday, and they said they don't give out housing until August!!!  And classes start in late Sept.  But still, that is SO late, as far as planning an out-of-state move, etc.. 

[racoomelon]

I'm not sure about the penalizing stuff, but I think it might be easier to work with non-campus housing. Any housing directed towards students is going to have lease dates that follow the academic year, and they're not going to be flexible with you if you want move in earlier. You might have better luck finding a place to lease if you look for off-campus housing, or find something through Zillow. 

I don't know if that's any help! This is just what I've run into as a student. When my roommates and I looked at campus housing, the leases starting in August. When we looked at houses being leased by realtors, they were hoping to start leasing the house ASAP or before summer started. The only problem is that the houses tend to go fast-- there were two times that we went to tour the house after another group, only to end the tour with our realtor's announcement that the other people had put down a security deposit. It was incredibly frazzling.

[thespeechblog.com]

10 hours ago, Jolie717 said:

Ok - as a wife and mom, I realize I am not a "typical" grad student.  That said, for those of you out there that are similar to me who are relocating, how are you navigativing housing wait lists?  Is it best to find an off-campus place, plop down a deposit, and then lose it if you finally get a housing offer late in the game?  Do off-campus places penalize even further if you drop them, like if they can't re-lease soon enough?  This is all new to me - so please forgive me!  

I talked to the housing dept at one of my schools yesterday, and they said they don't give out housing until August!!!  And classes start in late Sept.  But still, that is SO late, as far as planning an out-of-state move, etc.. 

Hey Jolie, 

I'm in a similar situation (no kids though). My partner and I are moving from Mexico. 

I'm on the list for family housing at my uni, but like you I'm not sure of my chances of getting off the waitlist. My department put me in touch with some current students and through them, I got in touch with students living in the family housing. From them I was able to get a better idea of my chances of getting into a campus apartment (they're pretty good), and also they told me that even if I waited until July or August, I'd still be able to find some options. 

Obviously every city is going to be a bit different. See if you can get in touch with students at your school! I think they'd give you the best advice. 

[esopha]

A couple of thoughts:

Sublets! If you are moving to a college area, summer should be lousy with people trying to rent their apartments while they go home/out of town/whatever. Most of the time you don't even need to put up a deposit, because it's just paying the original lessor a portion of their rent. So you can get the lay of the land while waiting on student housing or scoping out other apartments.

You may be required to pay a lease-breaking fee (the official term escapes me) if you do decide to break a lease. I've never paid one/heard of one that was more than a couple hundred dollars. It should not constitute the entirety of your safety deposit!

It may be easiest to sublet and then move into campus housing, to be honest. If you have young kids, you probably don't want to move house every year, and campus housing is generally more stable than off-campus. Plus there may be other grad students' kids for them to play with, etc. However, campus housing will be less flexible than off-campus. I generally prefer off-campus housing, but I like there to be a big psychological separation between work/school and home, so that's just a personal preference for me.