JBER Housing Office offers help finding off-post homes

  • Published
  • By Courtesy of JBER Housing
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  Military families know it can be difficult to find good housing from across the nation or sometimes from across town.

It's an old story that has a new ending: The Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Housing Welcome Centers remind service members there is an internet-based housing referral system, called the Automated Housing Referral Network (AHRN.com) to overcome that problem.

AHRN.com is a nationwide, joint-service, DoD-sponsored website that offers a 24/7 single source of available housing to incoming military and their families 365 days a year.

AHRN.com directly connects service members with local property managers via the internet, often facilitating a door-to-door move that saves time, expenses and headaches.

"This housing referral network is a quantum leap forward from the process we use in our office and the word-of-mouth referral method," said Richard Watson, JBER housing management support chief.

With the Internet, incoming military and families are able to reach out from anywhere and get an updated list of available housing from a much larger pool of diverse properties that will be available upon their arrival.

The idea behind AHRN.com is simple: local property managers, homeowners and military register their available properties on the site, free of charge, often several months before the property will be available.

These properties are then easily visible to incoming personnel when they search the site for available housing.

JBER Housing Welcome Center personnel are looking forward to expanding the AHRN.com program by encouraging local property managers to register in the system.
To make registering properties a worry-free proposition, AHRN.com incoawrporates several layers of privacy protection.

In return for registering their properties, AHRN.com provides property owners with a consistent resource of quality tenants.

"It's a win-win for everyone who uses the site," Watson said.

In addition to AHRN, JBER Housing Welcome Centers provide programs to assist service members in finding a place to live once they PCS to their installations.
The JBER Rental Partnership Program provides active-duty military personnel, both enlisted and officers, accompanied and unaccompanied with information about affordable off-base housing to include corporate apartment complexes, single family homes, townhomes and condos.

The benefits of this program are discounts and no deposits or fees with the exception of pet deposits.

Rental payments for all programs are made directly to the landlord through allotments set up by both housing offices resulting in more trouble free transactions.

For more information: stop by JBER-Elmendorf Housing Office at 6346 Arctic Warrior Dr. or call 552-4328/4374 or stop by the JBER-Richardson Housing Office in Building 600 Richardson or call 384-3088/7632.