The housing crisis

Finding a place to live has been really challenging.  Before we left I was able to reserve a furnished, temporary place for us to stay when we arrived in Wellington, not far from the city center.  Tbe idea was to use it as a base while we looked for a place to rent and to use that as a base to get to the know the city and its neighborhoods before we buy a house.  It was a bit challenging to find a furnished place that would allow pets, but New Zealand has a number of VRBO type websites, and through one of them I was ableto find a house in Khandallah, a nearby suburb that would be good for us.  Once we realized how long it was going to take for our container to arrive I asked to extend it by  a few weeks.  Unfortunately it was booked, but the owner had another property in Tawa, a farther out suburb, that we could move to, which worked out well.

We arrived in Wellington and almost immediately started looking for a house.  We soon realized that the difficulties finding a temporary place that allowed pets was going to be even more severe when looking for a rental.  Apparently there had been a well publicized story of renter whose dog had trashed a house and somehow the court had sided with them over the property owner.  This was making ladlords very wary or renting to people with pets.

To get around this we decided to start looking at houses to buy.   We made an appointment with the mortgage officer at our bank and started checking out a few open houses.  The open house process is quite different here.  Instead of it being an all day affair, a realtors typically hold open houses on sunday, and they only last for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes.  Then the realtor will close up and head over to their next one.  This means tha yo uhave to prioritize the houses you want to look at as often there are conflicting showings, and you end up speeding around town.  We eventually found a couple that we were interested in.  Unfortunately, when the mortgage opficer got back to us we found that we were not going to be able to get a loan.  Loaning standards are much stricter here.  It’s mandatory to put 20% down for every mortgage, unless you’re a first time buyer (which we are here) in which case you can go as low as 10% down.  Bu the problem is that I still don’t have a job, and until I do, the bank will not loan us money.

So back we went to focusing on the rental market.  As I mentioned before, we had decided to focus on the northwest suburbs, and I went contacted every house for rent that I could find.  Almost all of them state no pets in the ad but I still contacted anything that looked half way decent since you never know.  After a couple of weeks with no leads, we realized we were going to have to widen our scope to include different areas and more expensive houses.  Just as we were getting worried we would never find anything three leads turned up so I headed out with Hopscotch to check out a couple of them.  The first house was… not great.  It was big and had a nice sun room but that was it.  It was covered with hideous 1960’s walpaper that was peeling and a kitchen to match.  But it wasn’t too expensive for it’s size.  The second house  was much nicer.  Updated kitchen and baths, good location, and an incredible view, but expensive.

We got word on a friday that the ugly house was ours if we wanted it, we would just have to wait until monday for the agent to get confirmation from the owner, so it was relief to know we would have at least someplace to rent.  At the same time we found one more place that would allow pets, and when we went to have a look on saturday we found it was nice.  Good location, great house, and a good price too.  We pulled out all the stops of letting the landlord know we were interested, and followed up with an email telling him about ourselves and our story.  On tuesday we heard back from the landlord that he really liked us but was going with another family without pets.  We also heard back from the ugly house, and although the agent had told me it was fine and the house was ours if we wanted it, when he finally heard back from the owner, the owner told him he would not allow pets after all.

As this was happening I got a text from the expensive house that they liked us and pending a reference check would like to rent to us!  We will move in this friday, and we’re really excited to finally have a long-term place to live and especially in a house we actually want to lie in.  And there’s even a Bark Bark Woof (dog park) about a 5 minute walk away.