Hi there

As a lot of you will know, we have now sold our house and, God willing, will exchange in four weeks and complete in six. We are hoping to have our visa by the end of the year and need to rent accommodation for three months (oct - Dec). We are finding it really difficult. We have contacted all the agents in the portsmouth/waterlooville area in Hampshire and all of them say 6 months minimum. Can anyone tell me if they have been successful in securing a short let anywhere in this area. We would be happy to look at serviced apartments (which appear to be non-existent), holiday accommodation, anything. Any information greatly received.

Sarah

If you take a lease out for 6 months and then terminate your lease early, you will probably just lose your depost and at the best part of the deposit, which wont be as much as paying a corporate letting fee as these usually work out 3-4 times as much.

I was under the impression that if you terminated your lease early, you were liable for the entire contracts worth of rentals. Are you saying that if we took out a six month lease and then terminated 3 months early, we would only lose our deposit?

Hi, We're in Scotland in a short term let....we had the same problem as you are experiencing..no one would give us less than a six month rental...something to do with short assured tenancies.
We eventually found a small rental company that had propety in the area we were looking..we phoned and explained our that we were emigrating in three months time and they said they had come across this before...to cut to the chase they had their lawyer draw up a codicil to the tenancy agreement, which stated we would be released fromt the contract at the end of three months.
Sorry to disagree with former poster, but contracts are set up to secure rights for both tenant and company/owner...therefore if you sign for a six month contract you will be held responsible for payment of such.
Good luck in your search.

Its always worth having a look here

http://www.gumtree.com/cgi-bin/frame...s_to_rent.html

Otherwise you could try holiday lets:

http://www.ownersdirect.co.uk/England.htm
http://www.holiday-rentals.com/

I suspected this might be the case. My mum runs a B&B and has said we can stay with her (for a reduced fee ), but my in-laws are coming out from south africa and I can, quite frankly, do without the stress of both sets of parents under one roof for a month. We were hoping to have our own place and my in-laws will stay with us, meaning we can regulate the stress levels

I'm not quite sure what we are going to do. When you do searches in Melbourne, serviced apartments seem plentiful - wonder why not here in the UK (well, outside of london!)

Would holiday lets allow us to rent for three months? Also, we are not too keen on the mobile home thing as my FIL snores something terrible

I'm sure a property owner would be pleased to have a 3 month rental over the off season - and you could negotiate a lower price.

Should be plenty of proper homes on offer (opposed to mobile ones).

Would Southampton be too far for you?
http://www.town-or-country.co.uk/

It would be, only because the children are still at school, one in Clanfield and the other in Petersfield. I have found a website for self-catering properties and am emailing owners to see if they would consider a 3-month let (surely they would bite my hand off over the low season). They are in portsmouth, but that is not insurmountable, just a bit of a pain.