The phrase "started occupying" is correct and can be used in written English.
Example: The new tenant started occupying the apartment last month.
Residents started occupying the building from February and March 2012.
Hominids first started occupying areas with few shade trees some 1.7 million years ago.
In late 2008, the housing rights advocacy group, Take Back the Land, also started occupying empty and foreclosed houses to move in homeless people and their families.
Almost from the time families started occupying the trailers, complaints began to surface about respiratory and other health problems associated with formaldehyde exposure.
In the southern Spanish state of Andalusia, a network of urban squatters operating under the umbrella name of Corrala Utopia has started occupying some of the more than 130,000 homes and spaces made vacant by the country's housing crisis.
Liz Johannesen, senior manager of restaurant marketing at OpenTable, which takes online reservations for 6,000 restaurants nationwide, said that in the last year diners had started occupying tables for longer periods, mimicking the leisurely pace at the very top establishments and forcing restaurants to raise entree prices because they were turning fewer tables.
Stop occupying the streets and start occupying the Capitol.
Next we'll have to start occupying five-star hotels".
Buyers will be able to start occupying their units by the end of November.
But, anyway, so in France they start occupying buildings, and on May — the Sorbonne is closed down on May 2nd.
Forget about occupying Wall Street; maybe it's time to start occupying Main Street, a place Gannett has bled dry by offering less and less news while dumping and furloughing journalists in seemingly every quarter.
