Alaska rentals - No medium-term rental market

The biggest surprise during my search for a medium-term rental property in Alaska is that there isn't a significant market for people willing to rent homes for 4-5 months at a time. There is a short-term market for 1-2 week renters, and the obvious year's lease market, but I assumed that with the long, cold, dark winter here there would be a market to rent homes just for the summer, but there isn't.

People renting homes want you to sign a one-year lease, which I can understand -- they want to rent to locals with some feeling of a long-term guarantee. But by the end of my search I was offering to pay 50-100% more for a home per month on a four-month lease, leaving in September and giving the owners a chance to rent to someone else starting in September, but even that didn't fly too well.

Maybe there's an unspoken rule that you sign a year's lease and then just break it in September, I don't know. But I don't want to lie to people, and in the end I'm heading to Talkeetna.