New2Maine.com

She and I are going up for a little apartment hunting and a mini-getaway for our two year anniversary over Memorial Day weekend. We’re heading out Thursday night to hopefully avoid some traffic. Note to anyone traveling to Maine–I-495 during rush hour is a parking lot, avoid it at all costs. We’ve tracked down a few listings for apartments that we’ll be going to see and will probably talk to a few real estate agents too. I’m not sure we’ll be able to find the place we’ll be renting, as it’s still quite early, but we should be able to get an idea of what we get for our price range. We’re hoping to be in the $800-1000 range, depending on location and extras like a fenced yard for the dog or laundry hookups.

For those of you looking to head up to Maine, I wanted to remind everyone to shop around for a hotel room. We ended up booking through HotWire.com for a total of $143 for three nights (tax included). This is for a two star hotel in Scarborough, but the price we got was almost $50 cheaper (total, not per-night) than Expedia, or Travelocity for the same hotel. Even Priceline wasn’t able to come up with anything for $45 a night. I’m sure this probably won’t be the nicest hotel in the area, but it’ll serve our purposes well (our purposes being a place to sleep in the area of Portland). I will withhold the name of the hotel for now until I can write up a formal review of it when we get back. We’re bringing along our camera too, so New2Maine should have some photos of the area soon. Stay tuned…

With our attempts at online apartment hunting meeting with poor results thus far, we’ve started getting somewhere from an unexpected source: family friends. It turns out that more family members than we could have imagined know someone who lives in or near Portland. We’ve started to get names and numbers of people to talk to up there. None of these referrals have turned out to be landlords looking for tenants, but this is certainly and interesting and positive development. Rather than thinking She and I are nuts for wanting to move to Maine, most of our family has been very supportive (though I suspect there are some selfish motivations in there–almost all of them tell us how they can’t wait to come visit and have some lobster). The apartment hunt continues, but now with some actual human contact too and not just virtual hunting.

So I’m reaching the conclusion that May is a bit too early to be looking for an apartment for August 1. I’ve heard back from another apartment owner who said that she only accepts small dogs (ours is 65 pounds–not exactly small), but no news from anyone who is even able to show us their apartment. She and I are beginning to wonder whether it’s even worth going up over Memorial Day.

We have tried a few others websites. An interesting service called Rental Want Ads posts apartment wanted messages for landlords to view. We did this, but I don’t know that we’ll get any response (again, May is just too early). We’ve also spent some more time on Craig’s List, and Rent.com too. Nothing promising, but we push on. Someone has to have a place for us to live up there!

I’ve never been big on the whole apartment hunting thing. The last apartment She and I lived in fell into our laps through some friends at church. We’re currently living with a roommate while we save for The Big Move, and he did all the work to find this place. So needless to say, I’ve not much experience when it comes to looking for a place to live. Couple that with the fact that the place we’re looking to live is 275 miles away, and apartment hunting is pretty damned hard to do.

I’ve recently been spending some time checking out what Craig’s List has to offer, and I’ve emailed a few people about apartments. So far I haven’t had much luck. Looking in May when you want to move in August 1st certainly doesn’t help any. The few landlords I have heard back from either have already rented their places or plan to well before August. I’m sure that Craig’s List will be more helpful as the moving day approaches, but so far it’s only been useful for giving us an idea of housing costs.

We’ve already been up to Portland in February and spoke to a realtor in Scarborough about rentals. As expected, he didn’t have anything to show us given the nearly six month lead time. She and I will be going back up for Memorial Day weekend (which also happens to be our second anniversary) to do some more scouting. I’m hoping I’ll be able to find at least one or two apartments that we can actually see then, but I’m not holding my breath. If nothing else, we’ll use the time to enjoy more of Portland’s dining scene and to help narrow down the exact area we want to call home. So far Scarborough is tops on the list, with Portland and South Portland running just behind. Westbrook and some of the towns north of Portland are also options.

On tap for this afternoon, I’ll be adding some more bits and pieces to New2Maine.com and scouring the web for rental sites that list Maine properties. I guess it really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but most of the sites I’ve seen so far offer summer rentals with weekly rates in the $800-1000 range to start. That’s what we’re hoping to find for a monthly rental, so the listings I’ve seen haven’t been of much use. I’ll report back tomorrow with my findings.