does anyone here rent a house?

DH and i are considering this as an option since we won't have the actual down payment for a house for a while.

pros? cons? TIA!!

Re: does anyone here rent a house?

We rented a house. There were a few pros. One of which was that we had a smaller utility payment b/c he had so many accounts he got a commercial discount. Another was that if anything broke in the house we called him & it got fixed. He also paid for landscaping & snow removal as part of our contract which was nice. We were able to save some money for a house downpayment.

The cons were pretty substantial in the end. We found that he was going into our house without telling us for things like electric meter readings & gas readings. We had a separate meter from the garage, because he used it to do some work. We were not allowed to use the garage. He also swore all over the place that he was going to put up a fence so that our dogs could be off-leash in the yard, but never did while we were living there. He put the fence up 2 mos after we left. Any time we wanted to make any sort of change, we of course had to ask him first. Some landlords do not let you do anything...no painting, no changing flooring - nothing.