Wow, if rents are twice the cost of buying, you'd think it would be an easy sell, unless the cause of the disparity is the fact that nobody who wants to buy in that area can get financing.

As for moving, we used United Van Lines 2 and a half years ago and were happy.  We used them again this last month to reverse our cross country move, and got a former "Mayflower" franchisee (United bought Mayflower) and were extremely displeased.  Premium price combined with a low quality crew who couldn't have cared less about our stuff or our house, and did little to protect either from damage.

Speak to someone who knows about the tax consequences of the loss, which might affect things, if you can carry it over in some circumstances.

Check out whether banks are actually foreclosing promptly in your area.  In a lot of cities, the big banks have stopped foreclosing, I assume to drive up prices and to postpone taking capital losses.  If this is the case, there are huge shadow inventories of homes that haven't hit the market yet.  In general, I think home prices are being driven up by liquidity factors more than they are being driven down.  Yeah, the guy who can't move can't buy a new house, but he can't sell his, either.  The idea that you can't sell now and this is a temporary thing is not, I think, likely to be true.

I'd be nervous about renting a house if I didn't check it out every few months.  The rental management company doesn't have much of an incentive to make sure the place isn't getting slowly destroyed.

Prices should be going up faster than inflation.  They don't build houses in China and import them, and neither do they outsource building them over the internet to India. Yeah, they're doing more partial construction in factories, though.  

That home builders aren't building much at these prices indicates to me that prices are low enough, and will generally go up from here, but the inventory still left says slowly.  Rental housing is probably a reasonably good place to have money parked at the moment.

The real estate market is more local than ever, with much slower household creation and increasing Detroitization.

In my experience, if U used U-Haul then U were the one who loaded your shit.

I got more styles than prison got bricks- ain't that some shit?

Every time I move, on arrival I am amazed at the junk I decided to cart with me in the shit-I'm-running-out-of-time-and-have-to-finish-packing manic phase of moving.

I now have a closet full of clothes that I intend to dump at my parents'-- they're on a Goodwill pickup route-- the next time I'm there.

The Great Cull is one of the hidden benefits of moving -- if you have enough time to plan, and the fortitude to execute, in advance. I generally get rid of about 30% of the crap I own when I move.

That said, as soon as e-readers get to a development stage where they'll become a useful thing to have in my life, that fraction will go down. Move after next, I'll probably have many fewer books and bookshelves both.