House Hunting

Jim and I have been vaguely looking for a place to rent for the past few weeks.  We looked at a couple of places but then stopped looking until after the auction that Lindsey went to.  Had she been successful in buying that house we would have rented it from her and helped to pay off her mortgage rather than someone else's.

As you may remember, she was pipped by a more determined buyer at the auction.  She then decided that the Ballarat housing market is becoming too inflated to be of much interest as an investment location.  There are lots of business and corporate ventures coming to Ballarat so people are buying, and the Melbourne investors in particular are pushing prices up.

So Jim and I started looking for rental places again.

We looked at some units in Mount Helen, Buninyong and Mount Clear.  We looked at houses in central Ballarat and in Sebastopol. We ventured over to the other side of Ballarat but decided that Brown Hill and other places that side of town weren't convenient for going to look after Rupert and Hugo. We saw some places that immediately said "No", although it wasn't always clear why. But it interested me that those places which you might think would be OK said "No" to both Jim and me, and to Lindsey when she was able to come looking with us. Ian was away so hadn't been able to come looking with us. There were a couple of places that were a bit tempting but not so much that I could be bothered putting in an application for them.

There were two which were very interesting.  A 3 bedroom unit in Mount Helen,  down on the opposite side of the University in the forest from Lindsey and Ian's place, but right at the very top of our weekly budget. The other was a tiny, tiny house on an enormous plot of land in the city centre. At the bottom of our budget  (Go much lower than that and you are looking at complete dives and we can't see why we should have tenants in our beautiful house in Derbyshire while we are renting a rubbish place in Ballarat). No storage, no cupboards, almost no kitchen - just a tiny galley kitchen. It was totally impractical but my head was sorting out where you could put cupboards, benches, a pantry, the kitchen utensils.

We put in applications for both of them.

Yesterday, while we were in a supermarket in town, someone rang from the agency managing the unit, to ask a few questions. As far as we were aware, they hadn't contacted any of our referees or checked that any of the things we had said on the form were, in fact, true (you know, like having a pension, owning a house in England, having a part time job in Melbourne, that sort of thing).

Today we had an email of rejection from the tiny, tiny house in the city centre. At the bottom of our budget. Having not, as far as we were aware, done any checking of the things we had said. And then we had a phone call from the property manager of the unit in Mount Helen, at the very top of our budget, offering us a 12 month lease as long as we were aware that the unit is up for sale (we were) and pointing out that prospective buyers might want to look around the place (fine by us).  (They had contacted one of our referees by then, but I don't know about any of the others yet)

Bizarre when you think about it.  We don't know why the tiny, tiny house agents rejected us but it seems odd that we aren't reliable enough for them but we are for the other place.

It's all good though.  We pick the keys up on Saturday. Then we can start moving our stuff in. We will still be at the Big House a couple of nights a week to look after the dogs so will leave things like the bedding, the clock radio and other useful things there.  I have bought a brand new doona to celebrate :-D

New address available on application!