Renting A House In The Upstate (Or Anywhere!) Isn't As Easy As It Used To Be

Back in the day, if you needed to find another place to live, you bopped down to your local newsstand on Sunday and grabbed the Sunday paper, then spent the afternoon with a highlighter or red pen going through the classified ads, calling numbers, and maybe later in the afternoon or in the days after, riding by properties, making appointments, and eventually you found something that worked for you.  This had been the way it was done for 30, 40, 50 or more years for most of the American people.  Not so today.

Today, you have multiple choices in where to look to find your next home - you can still go the printed newspaper route, but you won't find as many choices there as you used to.  You can go online to your local newspaper's website, where you may or may not have to pay a small fee to view classified ads.  You can go online to local property management sites and fill out a questionnaire which will tell the PM company whether or not you are someone they want to deal with - speaking as a former licensed PM most are VERY picky about who they rent to, because the property generally doesn't belong to them, it belongs to a separate landlord who hires them to do this, and they have to justify the 5% to 15% of the rent that they take each month for managing the property.  If they rent to someone who doesn't pay, or who damages the property, not only do they not get their money, the landlord isn't going to be happy with them either.  Because of this, they have to be extra-diligent about who they rent to.  Expect to have your credit and criminal history run at the very least.

The most popular choice seems to be Craig's List, that swampy mire that somehow always reminds me of the town in the movie "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" where all the crazy characters hang out....a little scary, a little dangerous, a little misleading, and definitely someplace you want to be careful...but it's where you have to go to get what you need.

I've used Craig's List (or CL) for years, long before it became as popular as it is now, for everything from listing rental properties, to selling jewelry and computer equipment, to advertising my services in cell phone repair, to animal rescue work.  I have a healthy respect for CL and make sure that whenever I post an ad that I a: Am as truthful as possible, and b: Don't give away any more personal information than necessary.  Because while there are many, many legitimate people that use CL, there are also many, many scammers, criminals, con artists, and just bad people that look for their next victim there the way you scan the supermarket ads before going grocery shopping.  And there are a lot of people that make it easy for them.

Plus, a lot of ads on CL are scams and spam, making it difficult to know if the ad you're reading is legit or someone trying to get personal info out of you.  I recently responded to an ad for a 4 bedroom house in Oconee County near Clemson via email and received an "application" back.  I was told that when I returned the application that I would be given the address and door code for the house and I could go by and look at it.  The application wanted the normal stuff - name, address, phone, employer, but it also wanted my social security number, my bank name and account, and three credit references with account numbers.

Maybe the person is legit, I don't know.  But I'm not handing that kind of info over to ANYONE sight unseen, and certainly not over a randomized CL email address.  I'm not real comfortable handing it over to a potential landlord as it is...past references and proof via cancelled check or receipts of payment history should be enough.  But I could see why people, especially people that need larger houses, would.  Because there is a severe shortage, from what I can tell, of 3 or more bedroom homes in the Upstate, reasonably priced or not.

My husband and I own a cat rescue in Oconee County and because our current landlord has decided to renovate our home and put it up for sale, we have been asked to move.  We have an excellent relationship with our landlord - her brother knew us before we moved in, knew we were animal rescuers, and reached out to us at a time when we desperately needed to find a place to move quickly thanks to our previous landlords allowing our Easley home to go into foreclosure.  

At any rate, our current landlord is being understanding that the process can take a lot longer because of the cat rescue.  However, they want their money out of the property (it was inherited) and I can understand that.  And since I'm not in a position to buy at this time, once again we've jumped onto the rental property roulette wheel.

I was shocked, first of all, to see how much rental prices had jumped in just three years, that being the last time I really looked for comparison.  When I was in property management, our formula for most of our properties was $200 per bedroom.  We felt that this was a reasonable and fair amount - not so cheap that you get a lot of transient tentants, but not so expensive that your property sits empty for a long time.  That formula, one many landlords used in this area, seems to have jumped by about $100 in the last few years, so that now you can expect to pay about $300 per bedroom in some areas, but even more, sometimes far more than that in others.  And you can thank, once again, the housing bubble for that.

There are many houses sitting empty in the Upstate, foreclosures owned by banks in most cases, and banks are not interested in becoming landlords.  Because South Carolina stopped foreclosures for a while, backlogs piled up with all the banks - in the meantime those who could no longer pay their mortgage moved on, found other places to live, and left the houses in whatever shape they were when they walked out, to sit and deteriorate until the banks could do something with them.  Master In Equity hearings in local counties are no longer the 1 to 1 1/2 hour hearings they used to be, they can now go on all day because of the sheer volume of properties that are being processed.

Add to that tax sale properties - people who could not pay the property tax on the houses they should have never been sold in the first place - and you can drive through entire neighborhoods here where there may only be one or two houses per block that are occupied.

Investors are snapping these properties up, renovating them and either selling them or renting them out, but once again, $900 for a three bedroom house is out of a lot of people's reach, including my own.  So my assumption is that most people who have kids are renting a 2 bedroom place and just piling all the kids into one bedroom, or they're cutting back even further than they already have been on other things in order to pay for the size house they need. 

I don't know how people with kids do it to begin with in this economy...we live very frugally, we don't eat out (we may get a Little Caesar's $5 pizza once a week, because it's hard to feed 3 people on $5 even when cooking at home), we shop at thrift stores for whatever we can, we recycle all of our metal, including pet food and people food cans, I drink tea instead of soda most of the time, we have no credit cards...and yet, with three adults we're barely making ends meet.  Yes, the rescue takes up a lot of expenses, but we've been lucky enough to get a lot of donated food in the last few months, which has helped.  Still, it gets very hard to juggle at times.  With kids, I just don't know what we'd do.

We are paying $600 a month where we currently are for a 3 bedroom home with a separate dining room and partially-finished basement.  I think it's a reasonable price, and I'm capable of paying up to $750 a month for a comparable property...but I can't afford any more than that.  We operate on the principal in our family of "rent first, electric/water (combined) second, gas third, and everything else fourth", because without a house over our head, none of the rest matters.  But if we're forced to rent something at $900 a month we could very well be sitting in the dark a lot, wrapped in blankets in the winter, or in as little as possible in the summer, because after the rent, there just won't be money for anything else.  And while that works for us fine, we can't treat the cats like that - they must have heat and air conditioning to survive in the cattery.  Last summer our a/c failed and within 4 hours we almost lost a cat to heat exhaustion, while the a/c was being repaired.  Going without, at least for the cats, is not an option.

I'm finding only a few 3 bedroom houses in our area, and almost no 4 bedrooms (what we really want - we need an office if possible). Of the ones I'm finding, almost all are out of our price range.  Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but if so I just don't know where to look.  And I'm wondering what those who aren't as digitally savvy as I am are doing to find rental property.  With more and more communities passing laws against yard signs, you can't even go driving around the way you used to.  We're 30 days beyond when our landlord asked us to move out, and while they are understanding, they want their money out of the property, and sooner or later they're going to get insistant about us moving.

So anyone out there who is, like me, looking for a place to live, and needs something bigger than 1 or 2 bedrooms, you have my utmost sympathy.  You'll have it a little easier than I do - try calling someone and then adding the phrase "cat rescue" into the mix.  You don't stay on the phone long with them.

I'm even willing to be flexible - if I can't find a house, then a building that can be renovated into living space and cattery space is acceptable.  A farm would be great.  An old church, an old school, a commercial building in an unzoned area....I'm handy with power tools and have other building professionals in the family to call on to help me with what I can't do.  But I have to have the property to start.

I have only one requirement - I will not live in Pickens County as long as the current Animal Control is still in place.  Otherwise, if you have or know of a property that would suit our needs I beg you to email me at dotsplaceanimalhaven@gmail.com with the information.  I will pay a negotiable finders fee to the person that helps us find a place to move our rescue to.  I'm interested in lease/purchase and rent-to-own as well.  I'm open to all sorts of options - we just want a good place where our cats can be safe.

And here's hoping that as the houses sitting empty from foreclosure in the Upstate find their way through the court system and into the hands of investors, the price of a decent place to live starts going down.  Otherwise, our homeless rates are going to continue to go up, the price of rentals is going to keep going up, and families in the Upstate will suffer from it.