The Australian Housing Nightmare

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Full blog post: v0.1.0 - Zen and the Automation of Metaprogramming for the Masses

During our year in Australia, Liza and I had a hell of a time trying to find housing. To apply for a rental unit, we needed to provide:

  1. Proof of identity, which sometimes required multiple forms of ID as the passport alone apparently doesn’t always suffice
  2. Proof of funds, which often required multiple months of bank statements
  3. Proof of income, which normally requires multiple paystubs. I was living off of savings and rental income from my home in the US, and Liza is a student who gets support from her family, so we didn’t fit neatly into the income box.
  4. Proof of address, for where we were currently living
  5. Landlord references from every place we’ve lived at for the last 2 years. I believe our poor landlords got spammed with every single application we sent.
  6. A cover letter that introduces us, apparently including our hobbies. Fortunately, my favorite hobby happens to be paying rent in full and on time.

While these requirements (apart from the cover letter) seemed reasonable enough to me coming from the US, they were a far cry from how you just needed a passport and a payment on the deposit to get an apartment in Cambodia, where Liza is from and where we were living the year before. We got rejected time after time, presumably because of our non-standard situation, and also because of the severe housing crisis hitting all of Australia. Literally 40 people (I counted all of them) would show up at some of the open houses. I suppose this is what happens when you have vacancy rates of 0.9% in Melbourne, and Melbourne wasn’t even the worst. Perth as a whole was at 0.3%, with one suburb in particular hitting 0.0%. It got so ridiculously bad in Perth that universities pled with staff to offer up their own homes for incoming students.

It wasn’t until we finally hired someone to put together our rental application in a way that Australian landlords would appreciate and trust, that we got approved on the first try. (I would highly recommend Wendy, by the way, if you find yourself in a similar situation as we did.)