Melbourne House Hunting 2

 

DISCLAIMER: This will be an angry, sweary, frustrated rant. If you don’t want to read that kind of thing, please fuck off now. taaaaa

Right, so this time last week ish, I wrote a funny ( at least I thought it was), happy go lucky piece about the state of the rental market in this glorious but unbelievably expensive city, and today,well… today it cracked me. For the past two weeks or so I had been looking for two  private rooms for both Benji and myself, but such a simple housing need apparently doesn’t exist in Melbourne. It seems that in Melbourne, affordable housing is even more of a myth than in London.

And yet… (after Benji and I had sadly decided that it would be impossible to find a compromise that would suit both of us).

I thought I had found the perfect place. It had a  Jewish landlord, was 250 m from the train station, 30 minutes into the city, 30 minutes to Uni. For gods sake, it was next door the Kosher bagel place. But in my overly cautious way, I had to make sure it was a hundred percent legit, so I went through the Uni Off Campus Accommodation service. Turns out the landlord hadn’t updated the house to meet the increasingly stringent regulations in the last 3 years and therefore was no longer compliant with the Victoria Law on rooming houses.

So now, now, I am back to fucking square one, and will definitely spend a second week in a hostel. Honestly, never in my life have I found a task so tedious and exasperating. I have seen 20 properties in the last two weeks. 20. None, not a single one, was up to scratch of a house in Leeds. A house in shitting Leeds for fucks sake (much love to my home uni city). How in a city of 4. 2 million people, can there be a dearth of decent relatively affordable privately rented rooms.

Right, rant over.