Comments on: Handling the Housing Situation for a RTW Trip

By: Russ

Russ — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:22:24 +0000

Hey Josh,

1. For your renter’s payment you can try what we did. We use Wells Fargo and they provide a “Mail to” address. Our tenant, while she used her Bank of America account, used her bill pay service and had her rent check “mailed” to us using the address from Wells Fargo. We opened a separate account for this linked to our others. It was too easy.

2. Do you mean what happens if something breaks? I guess we got lucky and had a friend who responded, but we were surprised at how little our tenant needed.

We traveled for fifteen months and all I can say is don’t let these little details get in your way. It’s TOTALLY worth it.

Russ

By: Darren Van Soye

Darren Van Soye — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:52:16 +0000

We went with a real estate agent. It cost us the equivalent of a month’s rent. But, in the end, we got a great renter who pays us directly to us by email (we use virtualpostmail.com and have them send the checks to our bank).

By: Josh

Josh — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 01:22:57 +0000

We have a situation that may be specific to New York, we live in an apt that we don’t want to give up because we’ve had it for a while and rental prices in our area go up so quickly.

We’re currently trying to find subletters to take our place while we’re gone, but are plagued by questions like “how do we get paid?” and “what happens if the subletters do X?”

By: Kelly

Kelly — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:51:43 +0000

There are companies that can handle a home rental for you. We have to pay him a monthly fee, which stinks, but he did all the work, plus he remains in our “home” city and can take care of any problems that arise since we are not there to be landlords. Washer & dryer breaks? He takes care of it and asks our permission to spend $ on repairs. It also means he has responsibility to find a good tenant and he had a really thorough contract, etc, that we never would have been able to do ourselves. It took a lot of stress out of vetting a tenant ourselves and having to worry about being landlords on the other side of the world.

By: Elise Coury

Elise Coury — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:40:49 +0000

Before our RTW, I had considered all of the above. The only friend who was available to help was in an apartment. He moved into one of the bedrooms and we put an ad in Craigslist to rent out the others. With a 4 bedroom house, I made more rent money with 4 renters and significantly reduced my friend’s rent to act on my behalf while we were gone.