Moving Date

Over the past few weeks, I have spent many days and nights poring over available (and affordable) rental properties in our vicinity. My favorite sites were www.realestate.com.au and www.domain.com.au. These sites were already part of my default start-up along with gmail and yahoogroups. In the course of my house hunting, I discovered that there existed myhome, homebound, justlisted and many more. (Of course that information is probably irrelevant.)

After the initial SEND AN EMAIL TO THE AGENT on a potential property, I would anxiously await the response to my enquiry -- where was the property located, was it accessible to the buses (particularly the school buses), when would the place be available, etc.

Sometimes, the details are stated in the listing and all I'd have to do was to note them down -- the address, the agent, the property details (# of bedrooms, # of toilet/bath, # car garage), rent per week, date and time when the property could be viewed. There was a day that I went to five different places.

When a place looked promising, we gathered our documentation and sent in our application. All property managers require identification. Usually they would indicate that 100 points of identification was needed to process the applications. Each tenant 18 and above is required to fill up an application form.

An example of required IDs and their corresponding points would be:

Driver's License -- 40 points

Passport -- 40

Birth Certificate -- 20

Medicare Card -- 20

Bank Statement -- 20

Car Registration -- 20

Utility Bill -- 20

Pay slip -- 20

When the point system was like this, MacGyver and I were ok. However, when the agency alloted lower points for the driver's license and the passport, we were in trouble. They would look for previous tenancy ledgers or rent receipts, Centrelink / family benefit statements, or credit card statements, in addition to the primary identification documents. We were never quite certain if our identification would suffice.

To top it all off, since neither of us have work at the moment, I would imagine that our applications would find themselves at the bottom of the heap. This was apparent from the series of rejections we experienced on the applications we tendered. I heard this line quite a number of times over the past weeks, "There were so many applications on the property, unfortunately yours was not selected."

There was one particular rejection we experience which I feel reiterated the importance of the proof of income (we were unable to provide). We had sent in our application for the property which was at the upper limit of our rental budget but was literally along the street of the High School. The day after we submitted our application, we got the call informing us that there were several applications on the property but ours was rejected and that the owner had given no reason. Several days later, I found the same property still listed but this time at a lower price. I sent out a new enquiry on the listed property asking if it was the same unit which we had seen and applied for. I wrote, in my nicest English, that we were still interested and would still be willing to pay the original price if the landowner would reconsider our application.

Wonder of wonders, we still got rejected.

But we were not to be defeated. I just kept right on clicking on potential places to rent, arranged for open dates (scheduled date when the home would be open to interested tenants for their inspection), checked out more places and continued on sending applications.

We got our lucky break from a sales manager of LJHooker last Friday. He was able to get us approval for a house which was in the school's bus route at the upper limit of budget. (I won't post the details of what happened, but if ever you are in Australia and are looking for a property agent, I would surely recommend this guy to you.) He was the ONLY person I spoke with that seemed genuinely interested in the well-being of the persons interested in renting a place. I will always be grateful for the assistance he extended to us during these times.

But what happened was that right before we heard from the LJHooker person, we had checked out a townhouse near the school. In fact, it was an open date which I had almost forgotten. MacGyver and I were already at the parking lot of the school waiting for the school bell to ring when I remembered that there was this townhouse available being offered by Century21 and the open date was now. Since the place was so close to the school, we decided to drive off and check the property out.

The property manager was someone I had met a couple of days prior. He had shown me a house in the same vicinity and we had already submitted some documents applying for this house (in line with our resolve to keep on sending out applications). This townhouse he was showing us was closer to the school and the rent was lower so we asked the agent if we could carry over the application to the townhouse, and if we were disapproved, we would try our luck for the house we had originally applied for. Over the weekend, he asked for additional documents, which we sent over carelessly because we half-expected to get the same dismal results.

Then this morning, when I least expected good news, we received word from the Century21 property officer that the owners of the townhouse we had checked out last Friday had approved our application. (WOW!) We went to the nearby Century21 office and handed over the required reservation fee for the townhouse.

We are scheduled to sign the lease and get the keys on 12 November 2009! (Hurrah!!)

I hope that this place will be a good one for me and my family.

Please join me in praying that we have made the right decision on this move and that my family will be happy in what will soon be called our HOME.