Get a Move On.

As a lawyer, I'd really have very little to do if people did their homework before hand. Take landlords and tenants, for example. Landlords and tenants give lawyers a lot of work because rarely do they do what they need to do in advance, which is "check things out and make sure you're doing it right."

In particular, I answer a lot of tenant questions in the course of any given week or month, and many of them are questions that would never have come up, let alone risen to the level of needing a lawyer, if people had just put more effort and thought into findint their houses or apartments for rent.

Take a typical example: Someone rents an apartment in a bad part of town, and shortly after renting there, realizes it and wants to get out of the lease. They call me and ask what they can do -- and very frequently the answer is, Sorry, nothing. Or the answer is you're going to incur some legal fees to fix this.

Or someone moves into an apartment and the neighbors are too loud. Or they get transferred and need to move but they have a one-year lease. All things that could have been addressed up front by finding the right lease or landlord or rental.

From landlords, I get the opposite: They took in a tenant because the apartment had been vacant forever, and they just wanted to rent to someone, and now they want this tenant out, because they didn't realize they were renting to an unemployed pit-bull-owning bassist in a death metal band.

Move.com can help people upfront, meaning they won't have to talk to people like me after the fact. Through Move.com, tenants can find the right landlords and apartments, and landlords can find the right tenants. Move.com lets you search for rentals by region, zip code, price, even by the minimum number of bathrooms you want available. (That's more important than you might think, especially if you've got kids, and especially-er if you've got daughters.)

Move.com has rental listing resources, too -- so you landlords can get the word out to a wider selection of tenants than you'll reach with a sign in the window. "Wider selection" means more choice and better choices -- you'll have more applicants to choose from and can avoid Rob The Bassist.

So don't take chances: get the right place up front, and avoid trouble down the line.