conat

We are hoping to move to Victoria within the next 10 months and at present going through the visa process, (this is going ok....we hope). The worry we have is how do we go about renting a house within the Port Phillip Bay area of Melbourne when we cannot visit the area first?

Do you all recommend staying in an hotel when we arrive and searching for our property then, but what do we do about a delivery address for shipping etc?

We have written to a Real Estate Agent in Melbourne to maybe get some guidance from them and enquired if we would be able to secure a property going through their web site and basically doing it from the U.K, but to-date we have heard nothing, and don't know if this is a good idea or if it can be done?

Has anyone else done this? or can you suggest an alternative? any advice would be a great help.

Many thanks,
p.s We have been reading this forum for a few weeks now and think it is fab, a few of the questions asked by others and the answer they got from you clever lot have really helped us ..

Izzy

Can only really tell you what we are planning to do. We are off on 28th November. We have booked one night in a city hotel as we land in the middle of the night. Then we have booked 2 weeks in a serviced apartment, which is a fully furnished apartment, (approx £400 per week for a 2 bed (sleeps 5), overlooking the marina at Patterson Lakes). We went to Oz at Xmas last year and bought a Melway (their version of A-Z) and this has been very useful for seeing where properties are and what is around them.

I presume you are looking at realestate.com.au for rental properties ? We do, but again, the agents are really slow to respond even if you e.mail them. We have decided to look as soon as we get there, and to offer 6 months rent up front. We have got references and credit references to take with us and are hoping this will be enough. We looked at a few houses when we were there and it is really difficult to do it without being there. There were some beautiful houses, but some of them had literally been built on a spare block of land in the middle of an industrial estate !

anyway good luck, pm me if you want me to let you know how we get on !

conat

Thank you Izzy, serviced apts. sounds a good option, please let us now how you get on, you must be ecstatic, not long now. Can I ask? what is pm we are really new to this? Good Luck

Izzy

A PM is a private message. Go into My profile on the peach coloured toolbar and then select private message from the left hand side of the screen. You can send a private message to me Izzy this way, which means that it will
not be available for other members to see. You can swap home e.mail addresses this way if you want. Anyway - off to bed now !