The delirium of getting an apartment to rent in Melbourne

As my lease is not going to be renewed (the owners are thinking of moving in or selling) and I am running all around the city inspecting properties, let’s talk a bit about what it actually means to get to rent an apartment in Melbourne.

The rental application process is very straightforward, user-friendly, and simple, involving just ten easy steps.

1.???? Go to one of the famous property listing websites. (You don't need to go to another, for they're all the same.) Set the price cap filter. Don’t bother setting any area-based filters, just go to the map and apply everywhere unless it’s in the middle of nowhere. You'll end up somewhere, eventually, it's just not really up to you where it would be.

2.???? Apply for apartment inspections. All of them. In many cases, you won’t be able to just subscribe for a known slot, you’d instead have to send a request to the property manager, and they would send you back an email inviting you to apply for an inspection through their own portal. Miss that email by 10 minutes? Too late because a hundred people have already applied, and the agency can’t host a hundred and first person there for whatever the reason.

3.???? Most appointments you’d get would be in the middle of a business day which means that if you’re employed in a nine-to-fiver or thereabouts you will have to take time off work to actually make it there. So yes, attending those costs you your money.

4.???? Attend all the inspections you’ve gotten your appointments for. There would be up to a hundred other people there unless you can afford something in the vicinity of $600/week and further upwards. For a single person, this means you need to be a millionaire. Because you’re most likely not, you face a strong competition where you don’t even really compete as you are basically in the same position as anyone else and hence the choice of a tenant would end up being perfectly random (or probably slightly illegal but no-one would ever confess so you'd never get to know!).

5.???? After the inspection, you (all of you) get a link to apply for a property. Apply for all of them straightaway, and don’t even think of being picky if you don’t want to end up living in the most remote location you can possibly think of, or under a bridge.

6.???? The application process requires you sign Form 3 which states that no-one here is going to discriminate you based on anything improper. You have no way of checking whether anyone involved in the process actually follows this. Just trust them.

7.???? Then, you must fill out a questionnaire, including providing your current employment details, contacts of your management and HR, two references from your previous jobs, one or two personal references / emergency contacts in Australia, the statement from your bank account, payslips from your work, a small essay about yourself, at least three ID documents, the personal details of everyone who you intend to live with, and as much as TEN years of your preceding history of residence, even if overseas.

8.???? You will end up doing this for every single application. There would be a hundred you’d go through.

9.???? The real estate agency would most likely attempt to actually contact each of your references. Even if they are overseas. Even if they don’t speak English. References in writing are not sufficient, the agents would require those people to fill out forms for you. Yes, whether you get an apartment depends on whether your former employer is generous enough to fill out some bs form for the real estate agent. And your more former employer, too.

10.?? It is extremely unlikely that you’ll get an offer, even if you offer more rent, even if you offer paying 6 months in advance. There is no way to negotiate, you just get a rejection letter.

Not enough people seem to be talking about how utterly deliriant this all is.

The waste of time and money is enormous. The privacy invasion is shocking.

Most of the information collected is not relevant to the nature of the process of renting an apartment and should not even be collected in the first place.

To a landlord, the lack of this information is immaterial, as long as the rent and bills are paid, and the property is kept in condition. A data leak from such a database, however, has the potential to do some very real and irreparable damage to the tenants involved. (No database is prone from data leaks. Accumulation of broad range of personal data is on a systemic, architectural level extremely dangerous to the involved individuals.)

On top of this, it is incomprehensible that my living arrangements should be generally known to anyone else except myself, the landlord, and the real estate agency. To get an apartment in Melbourne, I somehow must maintain an entire back office of my former employers' management and staff who must spend their extremely valuable time and effort to vouch for me before Australian real estate industry every time I need a roof on top of my head. (I cannot thank them enough for their availability.)

This state of affairs is not normal and needs to change.

The proper process of renting an apartment should work as follows:

Hi – I like your apartment – how much would you like for it? – how much would you like as a downpayment? – here’s the signed contract – here’s the money – please disappear.

This is how it works with AirBnB right now. If this is possible for AirBnB to pull off, this should be possible for the entire rental market. I don’t see any common-sense reason why longer-term rentals should not be the same. (The lack of housing supply affects both short- and long-term rental markets.)

The problem therefore inevitably must be within the realm of the rental market regulations. What this problem exactly is, I don’t know (yet), however I would assume it may somehow be related to some tenant protections (which would make reasonably justifiable eviction hard-to-impossible), but that is not an informed opinion.

The readers are most welcome to shed some light on this issue in the comment section.