Renting a Home, Part 1: Managing Your Search

This week, I’m handing over my blog to one of my friends, Rebecca Naugler. She’s a great massage therapist in Guelph and recently she was gracious enough to offer my clients some generous tips and strategies for finding a home to rent.

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I don’t have any hidden sources or secrets for finding ideal rental listings. It very much came down to persistence to find the place we live in now, but there are a few things I learned along the way. 

1. First, I created a really detailed budget. It was important for my husband and me because the difference in our old rent and the new was going to make things very tight. I wanted to make sure our monthly and yearly expenses were all shown—whether they were non-negotiable or extras—so we knew what we could work with.

2. To manage my search, I created a Google spreadsheet to keep me organized (any spreadsheet software will work). For each property we found, I kept track of these categories:

• Date of Contact

• Communication Notes (including method of contact and follow up attempts)

• Address

• Property Highlights (including monthly rent and details that addressed our needs and criteria)

• Questions

• Available Date

• Where the listing was Posted

• Property Details

Feel free to create your own categories based on your housing, finance, and personal requirements. Here’s a link to a template for tracking your searches. There are 2 worksheet tabs:

1. Homes is for current and ‘dead,’ or discarded leads (I kept the dead ones because they didn’t always get taken down or my husband would see the same post and I wouldn’t remember why I ruled it out).

2. Websites has links to the websites I used to search for rental housing and the date when I last checked each site.

Recommended: Rent Panda is a great company for rental searches. They verify all listings including visiting places before they’re listed. I also like their online fillable application because you don’t have to do a separate one each time you apply to view a place.

Warning: Prop2Go is a scam site, period. Use your judgement if you think something is off. You should never be asked for money up front.

 Next week, I’ll provide some tips to narrow down and save time with your rental search.

Restore Massage Therapy is based in the south end of Guelph, Ontario and is owned and operated by Rebecca Naugler, RMT. Rebecca has been providing caring, therapeutic massage since 2000. To book an appointment, contact Rebecca at rebecca@restorermt.ca or visit http://restorermt.janeapp.com/