Landing Spot

Securing the first place to live: verifying a rental from a distance, out-of-state applications, and using a mid-term rental as a trial run.

Landing Spot August 18, 2026 Renting Sight-Unseen: Five Lookups Before You Send Rent You cannot walk the unit, so the assessor, the recorder, the state registry and the city rental license file walk it for you. Five free lookups, in order. 10 min read

About this section

Eleven metros went on Desmond Reyes's shortlist over three years, and two survived it. What ended the guessing was watching two cost-of-living calculators disagree by 40% about the same pair of cities: after that he stopped reading rankings and started pulling the numbers himself — county assessor parcel records, Census tables, BLS price series, FEMA flood panels. He holds no real estate or financial credential and gives no advice about either. Every figure on this site is traced to the agency that publishes it, and the calculation sheet is published with the article so you can put your own candidate cities through it.

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