Renting a vacation home

[alepat]

Hello,

I am new to the board! We are planning our first trip with our kids and family to WDW this November. We want to rent a house but I'm a bit unnerved sending a deposit check to someone who has a website with a pretty house on it. Are there any measures I can take to make sure I'm not taken? I'm excited about the pool and space, I just don't want to loose money by trusting people too much. They do have their house listed with a managment company and I've emailed them to verify as much as I can. I do want to hurry though as this house seems to be in demand and I've already altered my dates to fit availability.

Any Advice?

Thanks!!
Alepat

 

[mbb]

but everything was fine...here's what I did though, to alieve the jitters...

I called the Management/development company (found their number on the compnay website), and they verified that yes, the people did own the house, and according to their records, it was being rented to us during our time frame...

Then I searched every website that I could think of, and checked if the house was listed on there...it was on a total of three sites, and the availability calendar showed our dates blocked off in every one.

And then, I googled searched the owner's name...I figured if they had been in the news for fraud, it might show up...

...and then finally, I relaxed, and figured that the worst that could happen was we would end up in a Super 8 for a couple of nights until whatever mistake got straightened out.

We just booked again for this year Because renting a house was so wonderful, painless and easy

I used these websites to find a house:
www.orlandovillas.com
www.vrbo.com
www.fvhr.com

And a few more

HTH!!

 

[surfgirl]

I didn't go quite the level of mbb, but I was able to verify that the house I was interested in was actually owned by the same name of the people that we were contracting through. I also independently found the name of the management company and verifed that they did have a contract. I also googled the name of the owners and read through many message boards.

Having said that... some of it is a level of trust. Ours worked out GREAT and we will never go down again and stay in a hotel. The space, the kitchen were wonderful... the pool was awesome, plus there was also the community pool and common spaces. And we spent the same hotelling $ for a week for a 4-bedroom villa that we would have spent for 3 nights at a home away from home resort (1 bedroom).

Go for it...

 

[DisneyMommyMichelle]

just wanted to let you know that when we got married in WDW last year we had a about 80 guests fly in from all over the world and about 5 houses were rented from OrlandoVillas.com and it all turned out wonderfullY!!! we even had a "welcome party" at the house my parents rented so everyone would get to know each other before the wedding. the houses were all GORGEOUS!!!

 

[mareed]

I verified ownership through http://ira.property-appraiser.org/. We've rented individual condos twice, and a home once and all went fine.