Renting a house in Brisbane

To all those well-meaning people who told me that the rental market in Brisbane has become “pretty bad”, and that it is now “quite hard” to find a place to rent, I have one thing to say: With all due respect, you have no idea!

I went to Brisbane for a few days last week, to look for somewhere for us to live in 2010. I spent most of my first day there, Wednesday, driving around Kingston, Loganlea, Waterford and Loganholme getting rather demoralised because the only place I managed to see the inside of had mouldy ceilings (we're trying to escape all that!). Nevertheless, on Thursday I started in Eagleby, and I found three places that would suit us very well and a handful of others we could live with, scattered around these suburbs. On Friday I saw yet another really nice house.

So we put in applications for our favourite four to three real estate agents, and I flew back to Brisbane on Saturday with a reasonable hope that we'd be approved for at least one of them. Today (Wednesday) we were approved for the place I saw on Friday, in Loganlea. We've just signed the lease (by email-print-sign-scan-email back, because the quality is better that way than by fax).

Seriously: If you want to experience a hard rental market, move to Mackay. It took us two months to find a place to rent here, and in the end we only got this house by word of mouth, not through real estate agents or advertising. (And if you want to see just how bad renting can get, try Moranbah, where a three-bedroom house costs at least $600 a week.)

However, I am glad I went to look during the week. On Saturday morning I inspected a house in Loganlea. We had to go through in groups of three because the tenants were still there. I was in the second group. There were still people driving up when I came out! (In comparison, when we first moved to Mackay, Laetitia was going through rental houses in groups of about ten, and there would be at least four such groups looking at each place.)