How to rent an apartment in Florida
Do you dream of living in a place where you will feel like you’re on vacation all year? Sunny State offers this possibility.
Settlements in Florida cities often have many attractions that encourage people to rent apartments. As an example, I will give my estate, which is located in Jacksonville, Florida.
The residents have at their disposal two large swimming pools, a lobby where you can drink coffee and sit by the pool, a place to arrange a barbecue for friends, a cinema room, billiards, table tennis, a gym, a fitness room where activities for residents are organized, a wall a paperclip, a tennis court, a children’s playground and a dog pool and obstacle course for our four-legged pets.
Sounds like a hotel that we would choose for a vacation, right?
Florida estates arise like mushrooms after rain, which is why they outperform their offers with better amenities.
The procedure for renting an apartment
As it turned out, renting an apartment is not as easy as in Poland, where you can often sign a short lease with one month’s notice.
In Florida, things get a little bit complicated. It is not enough just to have money to be able to live in such a place. To begin with, the estate management must first “accept” us, and then there is a further procedure.
First, we submit an online application with lots of data about you. Then we are checked by an agent in International Background Check, which consists of checking a given person in various databases, mainly under a criminal account.
On the one hand, you should put a lot of effort into completing all documents and on the other hand, we are sure that we are surrounded by people without a criminal past.
The next step is to document the fact that you can pay your rent. Usually, documentation showing current revenues is shown. However, if you are moving from another continent and you have no income in Florida, then you can show a bank statement.
Thanks to these activities, building managers want to be sure that tenants can afford to pay rent and rent.
Agreement
When renting an apartment in Jacksonville, we had to sign a contract that had a total of several dozen pages, together with attachments that regulate virtually every aspect of life in the estate.
In the attachments attached to the contract, for example, information such as cleaning agents that should be used to maintain the floor in the apartment or information about taking the dog’s DNA, which is needed to issue fines to the owner of a pet who does not clean it after him.
Our dog Macho DNA was taken from saliva on the first day of arrival at the estate. The estate employees collect uncleaned dog droppings, then send them for examination and after recognizing the “perpetrator”, a fine is charged to the owner.
For the first cleaning of the excrement the fee is $ 250, for the second $ 350 and for the third $ 450 and if the situation recurs then the contract is terminated. Thanks to such activities, the housing estate is incredibly clean and pleasant.
A lease agreement cannot be signed for one month. We had a choice of contract for 7 or 13 months. Also, when deciding to live in a given city, you must take into account the fact that you should live here for a longer period of time.
Most of the apartments for rent have a furnished kitchen, bathroom and washing machine and dryer. However, there is no furniture. When I was looking for a flat to rent online, I found only a few that were fully furnished. Rental with furniture in Florida is not very popular.
At our estate we could rent a flat with furniture, but every month an additional amount would be added for renting furniture. Ultimately, we decided to rent an unfurnished apartment, because it was more profitable for us.
Additional information
After moving to our housing estate in Jacksonville, we had to report to an energy company and rewrite the meters. We did it by phone. In addition, you should take care of cable and the Internet on your own, although in this case you can use this company that provides services throughout the estate.
As you probably know, electricity and water in Florida are cheap. The monthly cost for these services should not be more than 50, 60 dollars.
After moving into the apartment, I also had to complete a few pages document in which I marked all the damage in the apartment. It is very important that after moving out we are not charged for any damage if it was caused by a previous tenant.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the waste solution. The residents put out the trash bins for their residential doors 4 times a week in the evening and during this time the estate employees empty them.
Size of apartments and monthly rental cost
This is a very interesting topic that surprised me a lot when I was looking for an apartment in Florida. The smallest available apartment in our estate was over 70 square meters. We personally rented the second, smallest available apartment with an area of over 90 square meters.
And when it comes to the cost of renting such an apartment, the smallest apartment can be rented from just $ 1,100, unless you choose options with a longer lease then the price is even lower. At this price you can use all the attractions of the estate. It is worth noting that in the US average earnings are 4x higher than Polish, which is why $ 1,100 for Americans is the same as for Poles PLN 1,100.
Keep in mind that there may be different rules, quotas and contracts in different Florida cities and neighborhoods. I described above what I met personally when I rented an apartment in Jacksonville.
