House hunting

For the past couple of weeks, me and atang have been looking for a new place to call a home. Our contract with the current unit is going to end in January. We are not going to renew the contract because of the rental. We now pay $350 per week. Yes my friend, you are reading it correctly, $350 per WEEK. With that amount of money, you can pay mortgage for a semi-D house in Malaysia. But it is nothing ordinary with the rental price here in Brisbane. Especially if you want to find a house that is closer to university. Not that it matters to me, because my university is right in the city. So technically I can live where ever I like. However, when we moved in at our current home, we want to be near with other Malaysian, plus there is also a musollah (surau) nearby. Furthermore, at that time our option were limited, in fact we didn't have opportunity to enee-minee-mainee-moe, because it was difficult to find a rental unit in vicinity. I have wrote about our difficulty in house hunting in this entry.

Our rent started at $300 per week. At that time, we didn't bother much about the price. The unit is big, with 2 large rooms, a laundry room inside the unit, separate bath and toilet, 2 balcony, a garage that can fit 2 cars and a spare room for storage. In addition to that, it is just a short walk to a bus stop or I can also walk to citycat jetty. We have renewed the contract 2 times, and have been living for 19 months now.

Property in Brisbane is getting expensive. The mortgage price hike is unbearable. And that was why our rent increased from $300 to $320 (1st renewal) and $350 (2nd renewal). So atang and me decided to look for a new, smaller and cheaper place because we knew the rent will increase to maybe $380 when we renew the contract.

So looking for a new place is currently our agenda. Here are the steps that we go through for house hunting:

1. Search for available rental unit via websites (there are a number of websites that provide this service).

2. Before that you must know suburb you have interest in, and your max rental price. You must also take into consider number of rooms, say if you have 2 kids, you can't rent a 1 room unit. They have some rule that you have to abide.

3. Once you have find a property of interest, write down the particular or print out the brochure.

4. Call the agent to arrange a visit to the property. You MUST visit or inspect the property before applying. Sometimes the agent has indicated a date for inspection in the brochure.

5. Visit the property as scheduled.

6. If you are interested with the property, fill in the application form. And you also need to supply some documents to support you application. Documents include photo ID/passport, bank statement, utility bill, your rent ledger, pay slips/fund script etc. You have to meet a specific points (determine by agent, and it is varies across agents) in order to be eligible to rent the property.

7. Submit your application and wait for their call.

8. Repeat this action, until you have succesfully obtain a rental unit.

How tiring right? So far we have call out to ask about 8 units, and visited 5 units (the other 3 have been taken up). And we have only submitted 1 application (1 application for 1 unit). Why only 1 application?.... You have to wait for another entry, my friend.