Looking for a new home

A single room is nice ‘n cheap, but sharing a house with flatmates… One moment you’re having a great time together, the next you’re wishing you‘d have a house for yourself. So we started looking again.

Once again we drove all around Christchurch to view houses of which either the listed rental price was incorrect, the living room smelled like mould (moisture is a BIG problem with a lot of houses in NZ), the bedrooms were so small we wouldn’t even be able to assemble our queen size bed in there, or the landlord really liked us but still gave the house to someone else. To find a nice house for an affordable price (for now only Emma has a job so we have to be careful with the expenses) isn’t an easy task over here.

At one time Emma spotted a very nice house on the web, on the riverside of the Avon river. First we did a drive-by of the house. Three bedrooms, nice garden, double garage. Very quiet street, and a veranda with river view. All that for only NZ$250 per week, which is pretty cheap here for a house with three bedrooms. The whole day I tried to reach the real estate agent to ask if the house was still available. The lady was hard to reach. Before long I was able to recite her voice mail message by heart. Finally I went to her office in person. There I found out that there already were three applicants for the house. However, we still would be able to apply, after which all applicants would be thrown in a pool and one would be picked. I didn’t think we would have any chance, but oh well, you never know, and it was a great house, so I applied.

Here in NZ, when you put an offer on a rental home, the offer is a binding contract. As long as the offer stands, you can’t make an offer on any other house. Well you can, but if you are accepted for both houses, you have to hire them both as well. The system by itself is logical, however, it becomes very inconvenient for the applicant when the real estate agent takes a long time to decide who gets the house. First all the references of all the applicants had to be checked. Then the landlord had to be sent the results, after which the landlord would have the final say in who should get the house. The landlord was overseas and therefore hard to reach. He didn’t reply to the voice mails and emails that the agent had sent. In the mean time we were seeing a lot of other nice houses being advertised, so the forced waiting time started to get really annoying.

After a week of waiting I had had enough so I called the agent whether I could cancel my bid. The agent told me that because of the long waiting time it had taken already I could cancel, however, it might not be wise to do so because we were at the top of the list! She only had to get the approval of the landlord and the rental agreement would be in the bag. Oh well, in that case, we would be able to endure the wait a bit longer :-)

Two days later she called me... we got the house!!! Yesss!!! Signed the rental contract, and January 5 we will be moving in there. Hopefully we will experience a bit more of the NZ lifestyle over there. Until now the street we have been living on was noisier than the one we lived on in Holland :-) However, a veranda with a view of the river should be able to create a laid back feeling, right?

a picture I made from the driveway