hunting apartments in melbourne

apartment hunting sucks…

chiz and i are from very different places, but some things, like apartment hunting, are pretty similar. you go to a real estate agent and explain what you want, where you want it, and what price you’d like to pay. then they help you search for places and take you around. when we moved to australia, we were expecting this to be the case… but it’s a different world down under!

in australia, owners of property are treated like kings, while the renters are treated like pond scum. chiz and i traveled to our first real estate agent hoping to meet with somebody about renting a property. instead, we were just handed a sheet with listings and shoved out the door. this happened at every agency we went to. soon we learned how this system worked, and we didn’t like it.

in melbourne, (things are a bit different in other places in australia), a rental property is listed on a website and printed on the weekly sheet of available rentals for each real estate agency. a renter can search the sites or travel to the agencies to look at the list. also, even though you pay monthly, the prices are listed as rent per week. it’s a bit tricky too, because it’s not 4 weeks to a month… but rather a bit more. since there are 52 weeks in a year, you have to multiply the weeks by 52 and then divide by 12 to find the monthly rent. that way they can sneak in a bit more money into the monthly rent! viewing a property is tough too. each property has a time listed when it is open for a property viewing. the time is usually for only 10-15 minutes! for example, a property might only be open for a viewing on thursday february 24th from 4:45-5:00pm! seriously…

this causes many problems for the renter. first, scheduling times to see apartments can be a nightmare. sometimes two places have conflicting times and you have to choose to see one over the other! second, what ends up happening is that you have a flood of people all converging on the apartment during that 10-15 minute block of time! these people are your competitors and it’s a bit uneasy and uncomfortable. in this small amount of time you have to decide if you want the apartment. if you do, you put in an application.

right now the market is an owners market. at viewings, there were tons of other potential renters there as well. we tried to apply for a couple of apartments to no avail, but soon learned why. since the demand is so great, you have to make your application stand out from the others. chiz and i are foreigners here and don’t have any references or prior history. also, i’m going to school and chiz is looking for work since we just arrived, so owners were scared to rent to us. when compared with australians who were applying for the same apartment, we had no chance. so we learned to play the game…

first, we had to put all our money into a bank and print off a statement to prove that we could pay for the rent. second, we had to offer an increase in the weekly rental price. then finally, we had to offer to pay months of the rent up front! crazy right!?!? this would definitely give us the upper hand… right… wrong! even with all that, our application was denied!

we persevered though, and after many long days in front of the computer and wandering the streets of melbourne, we got an apartment! it was a really frustrating process, and we couldn’t have done it without the help and support of our friends, lenny and richard. not only did they let us stay with them until we found a place, but they also gave us lots of advice, insight and just let us bitch about the process every night! also, all the long days in the city ended up teaching us about the streets and trams of melbourne. we explored and learned about the many unique neighborhoods of melbourne. if we weren’t in this process, we might never have ventured to as many as places as we did in 3 weeks.

our lease is only for a year… but unless something is seriously wrong with this apartment, i have a feeling we aren’t moving. neither of us want to go though that process again!