Well, until you have jobs lined up, there's no point in house hunting. But when you get jobs, then you can house hunt. Once you've got the jobs, then you can find the place to live. I might rent, but there is NO way I would unpack and re-pack. If you rent, see if you can find an executive short term condo, we've done that before. They come completely furnished, so all you have to have is your clothes, food and personal items. Costs a little more, but so worth it. Have your stuff put into storage for a few weeks and house hunt agressively.
My advice on finding a community is to go to greatschools.net and then to the
census mapper and get a feel for communities you'd be comfortable in, then research, research, research the places you think you'd want to move to. (Note: I know there is another website the correlates race and home prices in census demographic areas, but not sure of the URL. If I find it, I'll post it.)
For our last move, DH and I knew we did NOT want to be in an all White town - got enough of that in MA and it seriously freaked us out (not saying any one in those towns was prejudiced or bigotted, but it was just. . .weird in those places to us.) We also knew that we wanted a place with good schools because homes in neighborhoods with good schools in a strong town or community tend to retain or gain value, no matter what happens in the economy.
With that in mind, we found Zachary and we found St. Francisville. We did a little bit of looking at a couple of other communities that were close to the water and semi-coonass, but decided we felt most comfortable that home values in Zachary and St. Francisville would remain stable. At the time, St. Francisville home values were artificially inflated from folks who were fleeing Katrina buying homes up there, so that left Zachary.
I researched demographics, read up on the town's website, looked up the town in the local, regional and national news, went on websites and searched for information about Zachary.
When we got to BTR, we stayed at a nice B&B in St. Francisville for a week and talked to people in St. Francisville about home values and such - the local librarian, the B&B owner, people in restaurants. We went to Zachary and talked to people in Zachary at gas stations, restaurants, in
Walmart, the library etc.
Zachary had everything we wanted, so we looked at houses until we found one that met our criteria (4 bedrooms, 2+ baths, 1900+ square feet, able to divide the cat and the dog sides of the house, room for 2 cars and a truck, place for exercise equipment, decent sized backyard, and undervalued by at least a hair). There aren't any neighborhoods in Zachary that look good but are going down hill, so we didn't have to worry about that.
The only thing I wish we had thought about was possibly moving to Central, but at the time, whether or not their schools would be great was still just a little chancy, so we didn't take the risk. Still. Central has more of a rural feel to it, and we're both from the country. . .
You can house hunt without staying in a place very long, if you do your research before you even move to a place. Maybe that wasn't true before the internet, but there is so much information about most communities available online that if you are thorough you can know enough to narrow your options and key in to just a few places or even one place before you start house hunting.
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