How to Find An Apartment While Traveling Nursing

For those Travel Nurses who wish to take the stipend instead of the corporate housing, here are a few websites I found helpful when figuring out where to choose our next home.

Apartmentratings.com  - This is a website where tenants can review a property. Keep in mind, it is possible that apartments give themselves a glowing review and dissatified tenants seem to squawk the loudest, but the collective reviews should give viewers some insight to life on the property.

city-data.com/income/  - This site color-codes a map which shows average income for an area.  Users can visually see what surrounds a property economically.

google.com/maps - Consider performing a google search on a property and select the "street view" to browse the nearby buildings and streets to get a feel for the neighborhood.  Also click on the maps feature to see what restaurants or grocery stores are in proximity. Type in the name of your city and the word "businesses," then click on the map.

Zillow.com - This site shows the property costs to purchase and to rent of the surrounding homes in the neighborhood.

Trulia.com - Under the Local Info tab users can find general neighborhood crime stats.

Familywatchdog.com - This site shows the volume of sex offenders in your vicinity and who they are.

Also important to note, renter's insurance is a requirement for leasing an apartment.  It is common for a 300,000 liability limit to cover possible water damage you may cause.  In many cases insurance companies have a minimum personal property policy that is $15,000 of coverage. That is way more than we need, but just raise the deductible and that offsets costs.  

A couple important tips to note:  Our insurance carried back home in Wisconsin is not licensed in the state we are moving to so we had to pick a national company.  We chose AllState.  They cover every state except for Massachusetts. A three month/13 week policy doesn't exist with insurance carriers so a traveler must get a policy for a full year.  The agent gave me a couple of tips for future reference.  First, no need to pay for the full year of a policy.  Pay monthly or quarterly then cancel the policy if you won't be renting somewhere new.  If you ARE renting in another location or state, then she suggested that we call in a change of address instead of canceling and starting a new policy. The benefits of executing the policy this way includes not having to get another credit check done and therefore your credit score isn't affected.  Secondly, a policy at a new address might be significantly higher due to the new area but your policy cost will stay the same as quoted for the year. Cost would renew at the one year mark.

Renter's insurance is cheap.  For us it cost $33 which covers us for 4 months or $98 for the full year.  I recommend using an insurance company that covers all the states you might be interested in working in to save yourself some time and hassle for future moves.