Have you lived on a military installation with privatization?
If you have, throw some comments our way.........
I lived on an Army installation where Picerne Military Housing took over. I loved them. They had wonderful customer service, they were very upfront on their policies and when they took over they did not implement new insane policies. They began building new homes for ALL ranks and the homes turned out really nice.
I am now living on another installation that is privatized and thus far I find it lacking in every arena. It is a very long story.
The most frustrating issue we had when we moved from one privatized installation to another was money! Buried in lease agreement was the statement that you must pay up front when moving into privatized military housing, but we were not told this during our advance phone calls and the website we searched said nothing, notta, about advance payment for housing. See, our family didn't move to our prior installation with privatization already in place, they took over after we had been in housing for two years. SO, our family was not aware of that little $$ issue. Now living on a military installation is just like renting off post, you sign a lease and you pay up front.
It worked out okay for us. We cleared housing the 30th of the month. Picerne did the needed paperwork to stop receiving our BAH and we did receive our BAH for the following month on our next paycheck. This allowed us to pay the up front pro-rated rent at our next installation.
You could run into problems when moving though, for example, if you clear housing and leave today and arrive at your next installation on 15 January......You will be expected to pay pro-rated rent up front at your new installation, but your previous installation will still be getting your BAH for the entire month of January and you will have to wait until some point in (hopefully) February to receive your BAH 'refund' from the previous installation.
You must now plan ahead differently, from a finance standpoint, when living on a privatized installation than you previously would have done for non-privatized military housing.
I am not an authority on privatized housing and it appears that each installation and company does things differently. I had many high hopes for privatization when I initially read about it years ago. Some of my hopes have been met, but I still have frustration in that each company does things differently. I had hoped that once all installations were privatized, that we could all expect more streamlined housing policies service wide, for all installations. That has not proved to be the case in our family's experience, but it would be nice! Lease lengths are different at each installation along with a laundry list of other policies.
What have your privatized experiences been? Super, really ugly? What company have you dealt with? Are you paying utilities yet? Give us the skinny!!!
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