The apartment search continues!

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The morning after our night out on Fitzroy Street, we were both a bit worse for wear - one of us more than the other.

I managed to view two more flats on the Friday afternoon, neither of which came close to Wells Street, but we didn't leave ourselves an awful lot of time to look at any others. I was also getting to the panic stage as I knew that I had to start work on the Monday which really only left me the following day for us to find something together. We therefore thought the best strategy would be to find an internet cafe and set up as many bookings as we possibly could for the Saturday - and agreed to have a quiet night (not that either of us could face alcohol anyway), get up early and by the Age (the local paper with all the properties for rent in it on a Saturday (or so we were told)) and see if there were any others we could fit in. All in all, I think we found about eight to look at on the Saturday, which wasn't bad.

After a couple of hours in the internet cafe, I managed to persuade Claire to go for a drink - and we had our first Chinese meal in China Town (which was awesome). To be fair, I don't think Claire drank - but I had a few Chinese beers (the Asian beers were still going down well after Thailand).

We did get up bright and early, were out of the apartment for about 8.30 and had breakfast in the Australia Building on Collins Street. We had about an hour to kill before our first viewing so went through "all the properties in the Age" (turned out there were about 3 that were suitable!) and headed off to our first viewing. We were both very excited about this one as, along with a gym and a pool etc, this building also had a residents climbing wall (ok, I might have used it once - but what a novelty) and, get this, its own 30 seat cinema where the residents watched movies at night!

So we arrived at the letting agents office well early, like 30 mins early. About 10 other people also had the same idea, and turned up even earlier. Anyway - we were told that the viewing was cancelled and sorry. What a total joke. The best of it was, the girl couldn't really speak English, so we never even got to find out why the viewing was cancelled and why we hadn't had a phone call to tell us! The really annoying thing was we had went out of our way to get to this particular rental office and had lost the best part of an hour of our day. Claire tried to tell the girl that she was a bit unhappy with the service (!), but the girl just looked blank, clearly not understanding a word of what Claire was saying!

We then went to our second viewing - this was a one bed, so we weren’t quite as keen, but - it was a modern building in docklands, right at the waters edge. I thought it would have been a cool location for a BBQ looking out over the docks.

Here, the agent was unable to get access to the property as the current tenants couldn't be bothered letting her in! Yet another hour wasted.

The next one was a furnished flat, right in the city centre. Claire loved it - I thought it was ok - but was quite clearly furnished for one person and I knew that it would be me that would end up on the floor (seriously only one person would have fitted on the sofa). This evoked a bit of controversy between Claire and I - Claire quite liking this pad and me thinking it was the most unpractical place I had seen in my life (it was supposed to be a two bed apartment but you had to go through either of the two bedrooms to get to the toilet from the living room - how backwards is that??!). Anyway, we agreed to disagree and never to mention it again - ooops.

It was this day that we really got a taste of what the rental market was like in Melbourne. It is really really competitive - we were going to viewings and were met by over 100 other people looking to rent the same flat. If you like it, you fill out an application and then the landlord and property agent sit down and decide who they want to give it to. It turns out that lots of people actually pay over the rental asking price just to secure a place. Total nightmare. On top of that, with the market being massively in the landlord's favour, they really don't give to hoots about potential tenants - hence lots of viewings were cancelled, no-one ever calls you back if you leave a message - its not a nice position to be in really.

Late in the afternoon, we went to see a flat in Dudley Street, which is on the North West corner of the city centre. It is a wee bit of a walk, so we got a taxi (and had to direct the taxi driver there). The flat itself was immaculate - it looked brand new inside. Really new carpets, the kitchen was awesome and the bathroom was very modern. It was also quite big inside. The downside, there wasn't a lot in the immediate vicinity (but the city centre was a 10 min walk away), it had no view at all from the balcony, didn't have a pool - but we were going off the pool idea anyway to be fair. Anyway, desperation was setting in and, as we both liked the flat, we made our first application! Given I was still preferring Wells Street, we jumped on a taxi and applied for that one too - should really have done it at the time as there was by now more than one other application in for it, but hey - we were starting to learn how to play the game, it was Saturday night and we had applied for two properties - we were quite satisfied that we had achieved something!

One slightly funny thing also happened that afternoon. We were going to view a flat in a large building and were a bit early so had some lunch next door. The cafe was really awesome, and I was quite excited about having such a cafe downstairs - so, needless to say, the flat was already in with a big chance! When we got to the building, there was a sign outside advertising another property within the same building open for inspection. Given we had 10 mins, we thought we would go and have a look at it.

We were met with a really efficient looking property agent who took our details and gave us a laminated property schedule - how impressive. The flat itself was minging - like totally minging. It was worse than any student flat I have ever seen, had a "carpet" in some bits of the floor, but it had largely worn away leaving huge uncovered parts. I had a read at the schedule, and realised that the property was actually for sale and not for rent - and that we had just registered our interest in the live property auction which was about to take place.

Worse still, the current tenants (a bunch of students) were sitting about the property in their underwear (I kid you not) with hangovers. Such a bizarre situation we had found ourselves in. I then had to work out a way of de-registering our interest without looking like a total idiot. So I said "erm we'll just leave it thanks". But that wasn't good enough - she says, "oh, why?" to which I explained that "ach, its just not quite what we are looking for, but that ok - thanks a million, bye" - still not good enough - "oh, whats wrong with it?" the property agent asks. Now, standing around the property agent were at least 7 other people who clearly wanted the flat and were waiting for the auction to start, and I was hardly going to tell her what I thought was wrong with it- but then one of them asked why we were withdrawing - so I had to say something other than the fact that we want to rent something! I said it was a bit too studenty for us. "Well, yea, thats because its to let to students" I was told. I clearly wasn't going to get away with this any more - the property agent was now pulling out schedules of the other properties she had coming up for sale to show us - I decided we should just make a run for it, which we did. Incidently, the other property we were viewing in the block was even worse. It supposidly had a sofa bed in it - the sofa bed consisted three mattresses piled up in a corner!!

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