Recently, my boyfriend and I were talking to some of his family members as well as some of our friends about the upcoming summer and how excited we are.
As it turns out, a bunch of people we know are all going to be reserving vacation houses on the beach.
While we are excited for them, we are also a little more conservative in our thinking.
We would love to also be able to rent a beach home on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.
However, beach homes are not only expensive, they are hard to come by.
When looking for a beach home to rent and/or reserve, you have to make sure that you do your research well in advance.
For instance, there are some people who reserve beach homes at least a year in advance of the date that they are planning to go because of how quickly a home gets rented or because the price may be cheaper at the time that they make their reservation.
When I was in college, I used to go to the coast all of the time because it just so happened that this is where I was conducting my research for my thesis.
Because I had become somewhat known in the area for the research that I was doing, I was always able to find a place to stay (even during the peak season when everything else was rented out).
However, in recent years when I have tried to book a reservation at a hotel, I have found that even the cheapest motels are all oversold for the entire summer! The only hope you have of reserving something is if someone backs out at the last minute! Besides the problem with renting a place, there is the question of whether or not you even have the funds to do so as well as the time.
A beach home may not necessarily be worth the price that it is advertised at (as many of us know and have probably experienced first hand).
However, this fact does not matter.
It all goes back to the basic principle of supply and demand.
Because beach homes are in such high demand and there is a limited amount of them available to the general public (because some of them are private homes), the realtors or renters can sometimes charge up to three times what the home is actually worth because they know that people will pay it.
If you think about it, the same kind of thinking can also be applied to gasoline.
With gasoline, those in charge know that we all need gasoline in order to fuel our vehicles to get from place to place.
Therefore, they can sometimes increase the price of gasoline to well more than what it is worth simply because they know that we will have no real choice but to pay it.
The other problem with vacationing away from home in a beach house is the fact that beach rentals often require you to reserve a set number of days.
For instance, a few summers ago when I was looking up beach rental properties, most of them required at least a three to four day minimum stay.
So, before you go booking, do your research and then start looking!