How does one find out about rentals here?

[EightFingers]

Relatives of mine are thinking about moving here to live. They are pretty much open to anywhere on the island but they want to rent. What's the best way to find out about available rentals? Do you go through a real estate agent?
I won't be using Craig's List due to all the scams.

[Lee M-S]

The newspaper and asking friends both worked for us when we first got here and rented around (8 moves in 3 years) until we knew where we wanted to be.

The rental agents were kind of a bust; one required that we each pay a fee for a credit check before they would even show us the rental we (really, really) wanted. Then they claimed they didn't get the results for a few days (normally it takes a few minutes), by which time the rental was no longer available. When we went back a couple months later, they said the credit check was expired, and we'd have to pay again to see any of their properties. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Asking on Punaweb's unclassifieds might work, too.

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[Linchpin]

We are currently doing the musical chairs thing with rentals until we find the ideal location.
We had decent luck with Craigslist. The scams are easy enough to spot. And the greedy real-estate agents (you want an application fee BEFORE showing it to me?) were also easy to avoid.
If you do the social media thing, My Face has a Buy-Sell-Trade and a Swip-Swap group that you can find rentals though.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/420768608020705/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/BigIslandSwipSwap/

[VancouverIslander]

I advertise on Craigslist when my place is available.

Just call me Mike

[Gus]

I'm afraid most people use Craigslist and that includes the legitimate rental agencies in town. The scams are usually obvious and easy to spot. The biggest scam isn't Craigslist, but the real estate agency that insists you pay 20 bucks or more for a credit check before even showing the place. We used Craigslist twice in the last 2 years, and were happy both times.

[terracore]

When we first moved here we found a rental by posting "looking for parrot friendly rental" on craigslist in the appropriate section.

[Carey]

Over a decade ago we had the same rental real estate runaround some have mentioned, but had great service with Erik Hirkholm with Aina Reatly, (808) 966-7464
No idea if he still does rentals, but he found us a place that was perfect the day we went in and I do not recall being charged for anything (this, after having spent weeks with other more known, real estate companies that had us chasing around the credit check, "not sure if we can show that property", "whoops- that now is no longer available" runaround with others... I know some like them, but we found DayLum & Clarke not really worth the effort of filling out the application....we never heard boo from them after they took our money, though we did check back to them...always, "oh, someone else is handling your application"....seemed so much a scam

[julieb]

We had good luck with Day Lum when the lava was flowing. Could check the listings on line every day.

[Midnight Rambler]

Having just rented out my house using Craigslist, one big suggestion for those looking to rent - put a short description of yourself (e.g. single or couple, what you do, etc.) in the first message you send, don't just say "hi I'm interested, can I take a look". You get a lot of responses and even if the details don't matter that much, it helps to weed out people who aren't serious or who might be more appealing as tenants.

And yes, it's pretty easy to spot the scams, based on two things:
1) They're invariably listed as way too low a price for the kind of place they are, like a 3 bedroom house for $900 a month. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Do a reverse Google image search, or search for the same square footage number, and you can often find the ad that it was taken from (they're inevitably just copied from another ad, not created from scratch; sometimes they're from houses for sale though, not other CL ads).

2) The reply address is nearly always a real address rather than a CL anonymized address. I have no idea why this is, but it seems something like 80% of the scam posts list the email they used to create it as the reply-to address, while no real person ever does that. Maybe it allows the scammer to skip a step, but it's still a dead giveaway.

[EightFingers]

Thanks for the advice. They're coming in June for ten days to look around. Hope to have a few places they can look at when they get here. We did find some places on Kalanianole....