Exhaustion of the House Hunt

Hi Everyone,
Well the house hunt really has been a blood-thirsty hunt. V and I have been hitting real estate office after office day after day, and when he's had to work I've gone by bus. It's really competitive to be approved for rental and you see the same people applying at place after place, all with their organized binders of paperwork required for application, each of us hoping that we outshine the other candidates at at least one proerty.

These rental people usually require 100 points of identification, with points gained from each id document you can supply (such as drivers license, passport, other photo id, birth certificate, bank statement, utility bills, previous 4 rental receipts, car registration papers, a month's worth of pay stubs, written references from previous landlords, etc) And you have to have as many of those as possible, as well as personal references and work references. Also, you have to visit each property before you are allowed to apply, and they are only open for viewing for 15 minutes around lunchtime one/two days a week. Usually the first person to the house with a good application gets it, so we have to scramble from house to house trying to be first there and first to fill out the forms. And the houses are all spread out of course over several suburbs so we have seen a lot of the coast lately. Well, we drove by the coast anyway. I was usually too busy looking at the map to find the next property's location.

I've filled out dozens of applications now, and finally this week we got some nibbles. I'm not saying anything here for certain until the paperwork is signed and it's officially official. I'm glad we're at least being considered for some finally. It's been an all-consuming task. The bad thing is many places are only beaing leased for 6 months until they plan to rennovate the place, so in 6 months I get to go through all this again. At least then I'll have more Australian references so I don't have to chance they will call my poor USA contacts in the middle of the night. Thank you to all who let me list you as a reference; I really appreciate it. I don't know if they bothered to call the US, but you never know.

So hooray!, moving day seems to be in the near future and V and I will finally have a place of our own. I've had suitcases packed and ready to move for a few weeks now, so they'd better give me a key soon.

Cheers!