Houses for rent NOT VACATION RENTALS (Waimea: best school, utilities, moving to)

[aimeeandcory]

My family is moving to The Big Island from Arizona. My husband and I are trying to find houses for rent on the Internet but we are having a very hard time finding any other sites than craigs list. Every site we find is vacation rentals and we need a home not a vacation rental. Does anyone please please know of any sites we can view homes for rent with pictures? Can anyone also tell us the areas that are good for families with good schools? Thank you sooooooo much in advance.

Aimee

[hotzcatz]

No such site exists. You can see rentals listings in the online versions of the newspapers but they won't have any pictures. The two main newspapers on the island are West Hawaii Today (Kona side) and Hawaii Tribune Herald.

All the public schools are run by the state so they are all real similar to each other until you go to charter or private schools. The best school on the island is probably Hawaii Preparatory Academy up in Waimea/Kamuela.

What about employment? That might be more important than houses or schools. This island is also big, so if you found a perfect house on the wrong side of the island from any employment, it's no longer perfect.

Renting a vacation rental for several weeks is a really good idea, though. It will take awhile for your car (if you are shipping one) as well as anything else you are shipping to get here. With a vacation rental, you will have a furnished location with utilities already working for a week or two while you get everything else arranged. You also can't realistically pick a reasonable rental house from any sort of online website. We don't have homogenized housing areas around here, one house might be something you'd want to rent while the house directly next to it would horrify you.

[Dreaming of Hawaii]

Depending on which side of the island you are looking at, you could check out the Konaweb or the Punaweb. Konaweb has a section for classified ads, and you could post that you are looking for a rental and sometimes people who have a long-term rental post there. However, like hotzcatz says, you really need to know what area you are looking in. If your husband's job is in Kona that's going to limit where you would look for housing.

[Ellwood]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

What about employment? That might be more important than houses or schools. This island is also big, so if you found a perfect house on the wrong side of the island from any employment, it's no longer perfect.

Hotzcatz makes a really important consideration point: the island is BIG, so look for a home near where you will be working.

[Hawaii Bound]

Check on both Craigslist and VRBO for vaction rentals. A lot of owners will rent their homes out for extended periods of time affordably. I have a rental home on the Big Island and I have rented it out twice to extended renters. One time was for almost 5 months. Ignore the posted rates and just call the owners to see what they are willig to do. I'm sure you'll be suprised and all the vacation rentals all have photographs that you can view.