We are looking for an apartment.  This is our fourth week of looking, and so far I’d say we’ve seen about 15-20 apartments.  The way they do it here is like this - the landlord contracts out to a real estate company who holds an inspection (open house), which usually lasts 15 minutes.  Most of the inspections are on Saturday mornings all around the same time, so you create a plan of attack during the week and run around on Saturday morning trying to see all of the apartments you want to see, which is actually impossible.  I usually call the real estate agents beforehand to try to see if the potential apartments line up with our basic criteria, so that we don’t spend precious minutes on Saturday morning going to see an apartment that ends up not having a stove (that really happens).

But the real estate agents usually don’t care about me or the apartments (that Aussie customer service ethic shining through), so our conversations usually go like this:

Me: I was wondering, does that unit have a stove?

Agent: I don’t know.  That’s what the inspection is for.

I’m pretty much 100% sure that the inspection is not for the agent to inspect the apartment, but whatever.

They also have this thing where you can “reserve” an apartment you really like by giving the agent a few hundred dollars on the spot, which makes the landlord look at your application first, and you get the money back if you’re not approved.  This sometimes causes the small crowd of people who show up to the 15 minute inspection to push to be the first to race through so they can come back out and give the agent money.

The good thing is that the application process is all extremely regimented and the real estate companies act like disinterested middlemen between you and the landlord, whom you never actually meet.  There are rules governing what they can and can’t say about you to another real estate company when that company asks for a reference on you, so you never have to deal with a weirdo landlord who hates you for no reason and won’t give you a good reference.

Filed in Different countries can be different on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 ·