Originally Posted by h2oskineil

Hi

Can't speak for Melbourne but Perth is VERY tight for decent houses.

My advice... get everything ready before you leave the UK. You will need minimum of three types of ID. Photo copy passports, visa's, marriage certificates, birth certificates, driving licences etc etc.

Have references ready, names of people that can contacted to vouch for your character, Australian citizens would be good.

In Perth, you need to provide cash or a bank cheque, the equivalent of one weeks rent when you put in the application. This stops people putting in multiple applications. If you are not successful, you'll get the cash back.

Dress-up 'smart' and go and meet the real-estate agents personally, so they can see you will be a good choice for one of their properties.

Get the Saturday paper (early) look for the house opens and fly around looking at all the ones you want to view and ring all the private ones to see what they are like.

We viewed a home on Sunday arvo (last Sunday) put our application in Sunday night ready for the office opening on Monday morning, with ALL the I.D. and names for references which I had prepared earlier.
By Monday lunch time the phone started ringing to speak to my manager etc etc and by 2.00pm we were offered the house, but they had at least 5 people to call if we did not want to accept it. We had to take a minimum of 12 months contract also. (they wanted 24 months!!!)

If you are slow and do not have the ID all scanned/photo copied etc... you'll not get the house. At least that's what we have found in Perth.

Now we have the mother of all houses in Hillary's, just got to figure out how to pay for it now! :-)

Hope this helps?

Neil.