Rental Agencies For December Vacation House Rental (Clearwater, Largo: real estate, apartment)

[ClearSkyView]

We want to rent a house in Manatee County or northern Sarasota county
during the month of December. We don't want to deal direct with vacation home
owners. We prefer to go through a rental agent in the area.

If direct business referrals aren't allowed on this forum, can anyone point us in
the right direction?

[nphomeowner]

It's a good bit cheaper if you go through private owners. But, you can google vacation rentals in Sarasota and I'm sure you will get plenty of agencies. Things do book quickly for the winter so hope you are successful in finding what you want.

[Triple crown]

We've used Florida Vacation Connection many times. They are great to work with. Just be careful on other agencies and make sure they are reputable. We got taken a few years ago when we tried to rent a house in Clearwater. The website looked great, it showed pics of the homes and was even shown on CNN Money. It was a scam. 3 yrs later we are still fighting it. Check with the BBB before committing.

[ClearSkyView]

Thanks for the info. Sorry about the scam. That's what we're worried about.
In the past we've used local travel agencies here in our area. But they don't
handle house rentals anymore. We'll probably give AAA a try, but they weren't
able to find anything for us the last time.

Too bad we had to wait this late in the season to look for a rental, but that's
the way things worked out for us.

We're coming down to vacation as well as to get information about buying a
house. It would be great to find a real estate agency that handled both.

[ClearSkyView]

I was just checking out Florida Vacation Connection and I see there are
some homes available in December. The web pages load quickly and are
easy to navigate. Definitely better than some of the other websites I
was looking at where you rent direct from the owner (who is often
in England or Germany.)

[TamRE]

Here are some rental sites and agencies.

Rental Ads
My Florida Homes MLS - http://myfloridahomesmls.com/
Ebay Classifieds – http://www.ebayclassifieds.com/
Florida Rental Ads – http://www.floridarentalads.com/
Real Rentals – http://www.realrentals.com/
Rentals.com – www.rentals.com
Rent Range – www.rentrange.com
Vacation Rentals by Owner – www.vrbo.com
Sarasota Herald Tribune - http://www.heraldtribune.com/
Sun Herald – www.sunnewspapers.net
Craigslist – www.craigslist.com


Rental Agencies

Rent Me Florida
517 Paul Morris Dr.
Englewood, FL
www.rentmeflorida.com
Frank Barrow - 941.474.2882 ext. 228

Sarasota / Manatee Rental Specialist
Sarasota Management, Sarasota, FL
http://sarasotamanagement.com

Stringer Management
6524 Superior Ave
Sarasota, FL
941-922-4959
smirental@stringermanagement.com
http://www.stringermanagement.com/

[Sunshine Rules]

I would also caution to be careful with some of the web sites and places like craigslist, as there have been scams here in FL with people putting homes for rent on those sites - without the owner's permission. They typically target homes in foreclosure for this scam. Periodically we agents get emails reminding us to google the addresses of our listings to verify they aren't showing up on rental sites, as those types like to steal the info from the MLS to post on their fake rental sites.



Some other local property management companies to try:

Sarasota Property Management www.sarasotapropertymanagement.com

Casey Management www.sarasotapropertymanager.com

Argus www.argusmgmt.com or www.argusvacationrentals.com

[ClearSkyView]

Thanks for the agency links.

[let it go]

We rented an apartment through Gabrielle Morlock last winter season. I don't know if she has houses to rent, but she is an active realtor, who also works in Corporate rentals. She was wonderful to deal with. I never got to meet her face to face, but we were so happy with her service and product produced. I don't have her number or link...but if you google Morlock Enterprise, you should get there. If you can't find it, direct message me and I will look it up in my files.

[ClearSkyView]

We've rented a vacation house for the month of December in the Rosedale Golf
and Country Club on the northeast corner of I75 and Highway 70. The Monte
Davis Team is the rental agency we're using.

This location is perfect for us since we're not interested in a beach vacation.

We'll probably reprise a lot of the things we did on our last vacation such as
Myakka River State Park, the Ringling estate, Mote Marine Aquarium, etc.
Given those, can anyone suggest other things of that nature we might
be interested in doing? (We're not interested in water sports or theme parks.)

I sent away for tourism information packets from the Sarasota Convention & Visitor's
Bureau and the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitor's Bureau. This will give us lot's
of new ideas for things to do.

The Sarasota packet is big. It includes brochures for North Port and Venice.
Definitely worth sending for.

I used to live in Spring Hill (Hernando County) and Largo (Pinellas County.)
I've lived for quite a while now in New Jersey, and have been planning to move
back to the west coast of Florida. We'll be looking into that during our vacation.

Want to hear a little bit about Hurricane Sandy?

We live 3 miles inland from Belmar NJ, one of the Jersey Shore towns that
suffered the most damage from Hurricane Sandy. We're high enough so that
we didn't get flooded. But we lost power for a week and lost water for most
of that time too. To make matters worse, we had unseasonably cold temperatures
going down below freezing at night. When the power was finally restored, a
northeaster came along and dumped 7 inches of wet snow on us. The power went
out again for another half a week.

Can't forget to mention that just about all the gas stations were closed so we
had to wait in long lines for rationed gas.

There are huge piles of downed trees and branches that people have gathered
from their yards and put out along the roads.

I wouldn't be surprised if taxes and home insurance go up. (New Jersey's home
insurance is lower than Florida's but the property taxes are the highest in the
nation.)

The saddest part is that the Jersey Shore has a huge tourism industry that is just
not going to come back for who knows how many summers.

When a hurricane knocks out your power in the miserable heat of a Florida August,
just think about what we went through.

The coastal destruction is a big lesson for us. We will definitely not be looking at houses
in the flood zones of Bradenton and Sarasota. East of the interstate is probably where
we'll be focusing.