How to Prepare for a House Hunting Trip
Aside from a couple of incredibly organized friends who don’t have to account for children, pets, and other such accoutrements that make house hunting more challenging, most military families who received orders for a summer move have not yet found a home. For the most part, fortunately, they’ve moved beyond the denial stage to accept the reality of the situation—moving will happen this summer, so the two processes of packing and house hunting must begin!
Despite a distasteful association with packing up all of one’s belongings (yet again!) only to leave them at the mercy of either movers or your own moving truck, the packing and moving-forward process generally becomes systematic after so many moves, and the unpleasant factor is merely incidental. While military families may have great processes for the move itself, what most continue to find challenging even after 10, 15, 20, and 30 years, however, is the house hunting process.
So, stressed out House Hunter, know that you are not alone in your struggles. After accepting that the move will take place, it is time to create a process to prepare for finding your new home.
Here are six steps to help you:
1. Identify what you prioritize in a home. Do you value proximity to work, good schools, and shopping, or is a larger home and land more important to your family? Usually proximity and large home size do not correlate. This should help you narrow down an area.
2. Determine whether you want to buy or rent.
3. Research local school districts and ratings of each. If you have children, of course. You don’t want to waste a lot of time finding the perfect home only to realize later that it has the worst schools in the state. You can find a helpful map of school district boundaries on the Great School website.
4. Scour for home options. Our resource article on Finding and Selling Homes for this PCS Season should help guide your research.
5. Narrow down your list of homes further. The easiest place to start is by identifying whether they’re pet friendly (if necessary), then by touring the properties virtually to help create your short list of homes to physically tour in person.
6. Obtain authorization for a House Hunting Tour. This authorization comes from the Joint Federal Travel Regulations (JFTR) and is authorized in the case of a PCS to a location that is also CONUS or OCONUS (not CONUS to OCONUS or vice-versa) where the new assignment is more than 75 miles from the previous duty station and the military family will not live in either government or privatized housing. An HHT can only occur after a report date to the new duty station has been established, and it must be completed prior to this date. Authorization comes from the current duty station, and expenses are generally reimbursed under the Lodgings Plus Computation Method. This method provides for travel expenses to and from the location, up to ten days of lodging (receipts are required), and a per diem amount for the service member and a 75% per diem amount for the spouse. In some cases, though, an HHT is reimbursed on a fixed-rate cost. For more information on this less regular form of reimbursement, see par. C5624-B2 of the JFTR.
Now that you have a process for house hunting to match your fabulous process for packing and moving, it is time to get going on step one.
When making your list of priorities, what have you found is consistently most important to you and your family in your house hunting process?
