According to a Harvard study, around 40 million Americans have moved homes each year for the past 5 years.
If you’re getting ready for a big move, you need to plan ahead.
Luckily, we have done some heavy lifting for you and provided you with this helpful moving checklist for new tenants. Read on to learn what you’ll need to do in the coming weeks and months.
What Do Landlords Need to Know About Their New Tenants?
Landlords need to assess their tenants’ reliability before they sign the lease. If you’re looking for the best way to gain insight into your new tenants’ reliability, you should consider investing in a tenant background check.
You can send your applicant a tenant screening request where they will provide their credit history, references, and other relevant information. To run a successful landlord business, you need to be selective about your tenants to best ensure that eviction can be avoided down the line. Evictions are time-consuming, expensive, and typically a miserable experience for all, so it’s well worth pulling out all the stops to prevent them. The more organized you are as a landlord, the better you can manage your properties and tenants, and investing in quality property management and accounting software is crucial, especially when running multiple rentals.
Moving Checklist for New Tenants
If you’re moving into a new place, you will be faced with many, many tasks. Having a checklist can be extremely helpful, as it allows you to prioritize tasks and make sure you don’t forget anything. Here’s our moving list for new tenants.
Sign the New Lease and Make Your Deposit
The first step in your moving process is signing the lease and completing the deposit on the new property. Once you have made your deposit and signed the lease, you have reserved the property. You need to make your deposit before you start planning your move, as the landlord will continue looking for tenants until one is secured and if you wait, another tenant may snap up the rental, and you will have to start the search process again.
Before you make your deposit, you need to evaluate whether you’ll be moving during peak moving season to plan your move in line with the current conditions.
Prepare for Moving Out of Your Current Residence
Once you have made your deposit in your new place, you can start preparing to move out of your current residence. If you are currently renting, you should take the following steps to get ready for the move:
- Hand in your 4 weeks’ notice that you’ll be moving out.
- Hire a moving company for your moving date.
- Make any necessary repairs to damages that may have occurred during the tenancy to ensure you get your full deposit back.
- Changing your address with the government, on your driver’s license, for your bank, and any other relevant documents.
Purchasing Furniture for Your New Place
Before you start decluttering, you need to know what you’ll be keeping and which furniture items you will be taking with you. A great way to determine this is to look around your home and identify any furniture, cookware, or things you wish to replace.
Before you simply throw these items away, you need to look online and see if you can find replacements that you like and are in your budget. Once you have created your online basket, check if you can have these items delivered to your new place on your moving day – this will make the whole process easier. Then, when you have secured your items for delivery, you can start to declutter.
Decluttering Your Old Place
When we move, we realize just how unnecessary stuff is lying around the house. When decluttering your old place, you should take the following steps:
- Figure out how you’re going to remove any old furniture.
- Plan where you would like to donate old clothes.
- Consider selling any items of value.
- Empty your fridge and freezer over the next few weeks.
- Consider which food items you’ll be taking with you (herbs, spices, etc.)
Once you have decluttered your place, you can pack up your house. We recommend going room by room with decluttering and packing, spreading the work over a few weeks. Do not leave packing until the last minute, or you will become stressed.
Packing and Moving
When it comes to packing, you need to decide whether you’d like to buy or rent boxes. Buying boxes allows you to keep them should you move again in the future, but renting will save you storage space.
Pack up all of your things over a few weeks, going room by room. If you’re moving to a smaller place, check nearby self storage facilities where you can keep your seasonal items. Leave your everyday items until moving day, as you will likely need to shower, get dressed, and have your morning coffee on that day.
Keep all of your boxes in one room, as this will give you more insight into the things you still need to pack up in the other rooms.
Hire A Cleaning Service
You should hire a cleaning service for your old home and your new one. Unless you’re willing to take on the work and give both properties a thorough clean, you will need some assistance. A cleaning service will be able to provide both properties with the refresh they need, and you’ll be moving into a spotless property.
Ask your new landlord if they plan to hire a cleaning service or if the old tenant has hired a cleaning service to save you the extra expense. You don’t know how clean the previous tenants are, and you want your new home to be free from germs, dust, and grime.
Collect/Hand Over Keys
Once the moving date arrives, you will need to hand over your old keys to your current landlord and go and collect the keys for your new place. This process is relatively straightforward, but you will need to arrange the collection according to your moving plans.
Move In
Once you have your keys, you can move into your new place. Your movers should do most of the heavy lifting, but you will still have a lot of work to set up the new home. If you’re living alone, you will need to reach out to friends and family and ask for their help. Otherwise, the process will take you well into the night, and you may not have your bed ready!
Summary
There is a lot of stress surrounding the moving process, but so long as you’ve got a clear checklist of your responsibilities, you should get along just fine. Draw inspiration from this checklist to create your own, and add in any tasks you think will be necessary for the process.
We hope you found this blog post on Moving Checklist for New Landlords and Tenants useful. Be sure to check out our post on Moving into a New House? Checklist for a Hassle-Free Move for more great tips!
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