Renting a House?

Next year during fellowship, I'd like to rent a house. We've never done that before...we've lived in apartments and we own our current home. Have any of you rented (I'm sure some of you have!)? How did you find the house? Did you go through a realtor? Did you rent from a company or from an individual? Any pearls of wisdom on renting a house, especially on finding a good one to rent?
Thanks!

[DCJenn]

For House #1, I located it though the website of the housing development. I was a condo owner in the development and they list all of the places for sale and rent.

For House #2, our friend Julie the Realtor found it for us before we moved here.

Jenn

[SuzySunshine]

DH and I rented one in medical school, it was really more of a cottage, but it was self standing.

Anyway, we found it through an internal website at this medical school that listed rentals. People were assured that the only people that had access to it were staff and students so they knew for the most part they'd get better renters.

[peggyfromwastate]

I have only rented from family (which they advise to never do) but I think that renting from a realtor generally increases the fee by about 5%. Not really sure about that. If possible, I would go by a word-of-mouth type of thing. Maybe there is a person who works at the hospital and is moving away or something but wants to keep his or her house as a rental?

[houseelf]

Have you tried rentalhouses.com?

Kelly

[planet]

We are currently renting a house that we found on craigslist.com. I prefer not going through a realtor just because I like to know and like our landlords. We looked at a lot of places (we had a place already so we took our time to find the right house) and ruled out any places where we didn't mesh with the landlords, like the ones with the fireplace they said we couldn't actually use even though it worked fine. Criagslist was great.

I would second Planets thoughts on knowing your landlord. We have rented houses before (not in the US though) through realtors and directly through landlords, and the former is a big pain in the ass when you need to get anything done. The agent has to go to the landlord for every little thing, and we found things took ages to get done.
We want to rent a house again next year and there seems to be a lot on craigslist.

[Meenah]

When I was undergrad (many moons ago) the Foreign Language Department always had a professor out of the country on Sabattical, and they usually "rented" to Grad Students.