If you’re moving in the middle of the year, chances are you’ve messed up somewhere.
Maybe it wasn’t the right place to begin with. Maybe yours wasn’t the right roommate. Maybe, as happened to a friend of mine, you made the mistake of picking a house whose pipes burst, flooding your basement with sewage. Then you woke up one day and decided, based on a widely debunked online documentary film with conspiratorial allegations, that you should leave the country to become a farm laborer in Ecuador.
Whatever your reason for leaving, though, you will face the same two key issues. First, getting out, and second, finding a place to go.
“Getting out” probably seems like the easy part, but it’s not. While rentals are understandably most abundant during the summer, there’s always something on the market. And if you’re desperate enough to move in the middle of the year, chances are anywhere will do.
But getting out presents obstacles. Many property management companies require that tenants sign 12-month lease agreements, which mean you will be required to pay 12 months’ rent unless you can find someone else to do it for you through a sublease. Even if you’re not on a lease, social pressure usually requires you to find someone to replace you if you move out and leave your roommates behind.
For that, there is only really one place to turn, provided you don’t happen to know someone willing to replace you or have an extremely accommodating landlord. That place is Craigslist.
Craigslist more or less lives up to its reputation when it comes to finding someone to sublet your place. In case you’re not clear on what reputation I’m referring to, it’s the one that casts it as Lefty the Salesman in Web site form, assuming (as I always have) that Lefty was moonlighting as a pimp, but that the makers of “The Muppet Show” decided against exploring that side of his character.
For instance, let’s say, hypothetically, your roommate spends three years in college, but never manages to gain enough credits to become a sophomore. Let’s say his parents decide that waking up every day to a hangover, electing against going to class in favor of marathon sessions of Half-Life, and lighting his armpit hairs on fire whenever the fancy strikes him, are not the reason they are subsidizing his $400-a-month rent in Eugene, nor something he couldn’t just as easily do under their roof.
Then they tell him he needs to leave. He posts an advertisement on Craigslist, which seems promising. The best he can come up with: a couple in their 30s who will only consent to move in for a month, and only if they are allowed to keep a large dog and pay lower rent and you agree to be quiet.
That’s all, of course, so hypothetical it strains credibility. And I had a friend who was in a worse predicament! He lost both roommates throughout the course of a year. One was courteous enough to have a ready replacement. The other was the aforementioned
Ecuadorean farm laborer.
After he decided he couldn’t stomach living in the United States anymore, my friend’s roommate turned to Craigslist to find someone who not only could, but would be willing to do it in his house, too. The guy he found seemed nice enough.
Then, after he had moved in and signed onto their rental agreement, he told his new roommates he liked to “sling a little yay.” Then they discovered that was his primary source of income. Then they found out he had a gun. And he felt compelled to take it with him to every bedroom in the house when he got home in the middle of the night. There, he woke each of them up to make sure they were his roommates, I suppose fearing one night they would turn out to be participants in some sort of elaborate robbery, or possibly Lefty the Salesman.
Fortunately, that was in mid-April for a lease that ended in June.
That’s not to say it’s all horror stories. Both times when I have had to move mid-year, I’ve found a palatable solution on Craigslist. Only one of those involved conduct just the legal side of extortion over the damage deposit and a place that reeked of cat poo and had a wall covered in graffiti.
To avoid the nightmare scenarios, all you need to do is be diligent and conscientious. Preferably, get it right the first time, but if not, be discerning about advertisements, think of contingency plans and, above all, remember you’ll only have to deal with anything for a year — at most.
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