Because much of my busi­ness revolves around relo­ca­tion I help many peo­ple rent before they buy.  (Some never buy and that’s fine with me, too.)  Tomor­row, a young fam­ily who trans­ferred from Europe to Seat­tle with Amazon.com will move into an east­side rental home.  The loca­tion is per­fect: walk­ing dis­tance to a Park & Ride for an easy com­mute via I-90 across Lake Wash­ing­ton. The neigh­bor­hood, close to Lake Wash­ing­ton,  is quiet with plenty of parks and play­grounds  — just what a mother of a three-year old would want.

When we started our col­lab­o­ra­tive search via the Web, the young fam­ily had their eyes set on Seat­tle neigh­bor­hoods,  specif­i­cally the Queen Ann and Green Lake areas.  As it turned out the two most attrac­tive homes we saw after their arrival were one in the Walling­ford neigh­bor­hood and one in Queen Anne — the lat­ter chiefly because of a won­der­ful view of the city.  But there were draw­backs with all these homes:  too far to walk to every­day con­ve­niences, restric­tive park­ing and heavy local traffic.

What these new­com­ers to Seat­tle liked were trees, parks, and open spaces. That’s what they liked about the east­side neigh­bor­hoods. Not hav­ing a car ini­tially and intend­ing to buy just one car, the prox­im­ity to pub­lic trans­port was crit­i­cal. Sur­pris­ingly, some best east­side neigh­bor­hoods offered greater con­ve­nience than some of the Seat­tle loca­tions. Finally, the qual­ity of  pre-school facil­i­ties made the South Belle­vue home nearly ideal.

Because exe­cut­ing a lease can be done fairly quickly I edu­cate my clients about land­lord and ten­ant law at the out­set.  I will give them a stan­dard lease to review before the time comes to fill it out, date and sign.

Find­ing the right rental home is a good thing.  Rent­ing that home the right way will make the stay enjoyable.

P.S.

To the unini­ti­ated, the process of rent­ing  a home would appear to be sim­ple. After all, there is no financ­ing, no title issues, no escrow.  In fact, an inex­pe­ri­enced single-family home land­lord and a less than qual­i­fied renter can get into plenty of trou­ble.  That’s why many home rentals are han­dled by real estate agents or, even bet­ter, by prop­erty man­age­ment com­pa­nies. They know how to qual­ify a renter with credit and back­ground checks, they use rental con­tracts designed to elim­i­nate mis­un­der­stand­ings and are in com­pli­ance with the law. Their ser­vice includes a walk-through with a detailed check list that cap­tures defects before move-in. They know to give the renter required infor­ma­tion on the dan­gers of lead paint and mold. They will de-commision that hot tub to avoid an acci­dent and elim­i­nate unnec­es­sary liabilty.