Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Lesson 1: House Hunting For The Horribly Hopeless

Pictured here: the horribly hopeless. Look, she's so hopeless, she thinks a box of tea is a hat!

So far, in my first semester of university, I've met maybe a handful of people who live independently. The big trend in first year seems to be either living at home with your parents or staying on campus, because either way, someone else is doing your laundry, making your food and taking care of your bills. To a impoverished uni student, this is like manna from Heaven. Oh, how lovely it must be to come home to a pile of clean laundry! To be forced to eat filling, nutritionally balanced meals! To have the added risk of a parental figure bursting in on you every time you bring home some sweet university booty!

However, not all of us live in close vicinity of our chosen place of study and even less of us can afford to shell out seven grand a semester to live on campus (and subject ourselves to severe alcohol poisoning every other day. Jesus, college kids, your livers remind me of a boxer's knuckles- they're all tough, scarred and leathery). That leaves a couple of options. One, subject yourself to the extreme financial buggery that is Uni Lodge (seriously, you're paying around $350 a week for one bedroom. Who the fuck can afford to spend that much on one goddamn bedroom?). Two, move into a share house. As you're probably guessing from my extreme negativity towards Uni Lodge, I chose the second option, and for the most part, it worked out pretty well. However, having said that, I made a few pretty big rookie errors.

Probably my first error was underestimating how much paperwork I would have to do, and how important it was that I understood it and could fill it all in correctly. Let me drum this into you now- house hunting is not a leisure activity. It is a highly competitive sport. If you are trying to find a place close to a university, be prepared to battle it out with the thousands of other students who want exactly the same thing and are probably a lot more prepared than you. I remember when I went to view one house, there was a girl there who actually had a signed letter from her father's lawyer giving an extra advantage over the billions of others making an application. Furthermore  if you're anything like me and have little to no parental support when it comes to these things, it's going to be even more difficult because honestly, you will have no idea what you're doing.

Get used to seeing a lot of these fucking things.

But here's the thing, these forms are fucking crucial to you even having the faintest chance of finding a place. It's not like handing in a piece of homework a few days late. For the best possible chance of just being considered, you need to have your forms into the real estate agent the day of your inspection, and everything needs to be filled out correctly. If you're not sure what you need to put in your application, go to your local real estate agent and ask them before you look at any places. Generally, I found that the forms didn't exactly specify the finer details of what I'd need to hand up along with my forms, which consisted of things like proof of my parents' income, a guarantor's signature and my bank account details. In fact, I think it took one kind real estate agent to point this out to me, and even then, I still didn't get anywhere for quite awhile.

On that note, if you're applying with a group, every single person has to take responsibility. Here's a a small hint: if you can't trust a person to complete their forms on time and hand them up with the rest of the group, they are probably not someone you are going to want to live with. I had an experience where I politely asked someone to leave the group I was house hunting with because every time we went to apply, she held us up by either filling in her forms late or not making sure the information was correct before she submitted them. After the third or fourth time this happened, my group realized we really didn't want to live with someone that unreliable. If whoever you've decided to house hunt with is already revealing themselves to be a little slack and selfish, then those problems are only going to get worse when they're responsible for helping you pay the bills. Paying your own share is hard enough, let alone being responsible for someone else's.

Before I ever went to check out a house, I got into the habit of printing out the forms and filling them out prior to the inspection. I'm going to be completely honest and say filling out that many forms was an activity that I would rate as having similar levels of pleasure and enjoyment to pouring hot wax onto your exposed anus. It was getting to the stage where every evening I was sitting at my desk until the wee hours of the morning surrounded by mountains of important documents and crumpled tissues (which was way too similar to my end of school exams for me to be remotely comfortable). Unfortunately, at the time I did not have any epiphany regarding a way to make filling out these forms a lot easier for myself. Luckily, my friend Mel (from the wonderful blog My Student Kitchen) and her boyfriend did, and kindly allowed me to repeat this advice to future house-hunters. You see, when these two were house hunting, they made up what Mel affectionately refers to as a "Stupid Number Book". Basically, it's a small book or notepad where you keep a copy of all the important numbers you need for real estate applications- things like your passport number, the phone numbers of your referees, how many zombie children you can take on in a fight (mine is 24). It's a really handy way to keep everything in one place and it means that you won't spend a lot of your night swearing and cursing because you lost your passport under an avalanche of photocopies of your birth certificate.

.... heeeeelp... meeee....

There's another important point- you're going to want about twenty copies of all your official documents. Usually for real estate applications, you require about 110 points of I.D, which usually means copies of things like your birth certificate, passport, driver's license (if you have one), bank statements and centrelink documents. Pro tip, if you think you have enough copies, you probably don't. Also, while it isn't mandatory to get copies of everything in colour, it's wise to anyway, because every little bit of effort really helps. Real estate agents generally will be more inclined to consider applications that are neat, well-presented and have a comprehensive level of required documents stapled to the back of them. So if you hand up something that's missing things, filled out in the wrong order and looks like it's been puked on by your pet dog, they probably won't be too eager to get you to sign a lease.

When it comes to the act of house hunting itself, you're going to want to carefully consider a few things. A really important one is your budget. Do you have a realistic idea of what you're able to pay in rent each week? If you're on centrelink payments like me, you're looking at about $488 a fortnight. In my situation, the maximum amount of rent I can pay without being in extreme poverty is around $150. That leaves me with about $188 a fortnight to spend on food, electricity bills and internet. Plus booze. Lots of booze. In fact, have fun getting used to drinking cheap. I always swore to myself that I would drink with great dignity and style. Then I learned how to drink five dollar wine. Never looked back.

Gossips: A cheap wine for an even cheaper student.
My blood is probably 70% Sweet Lips now.

Other things you might want to consider include:
  • How close you are to your university/public transport and other amenities. This is definitely a must if you can't afford to run a car and also if you'd like to minimize your risk of having a really shitty commute.
  • How much space you need in proportion to how much money you can spend. Even if you end up paying a ridiculously low rent, no one is going to happy if you're crammed together like a tin of sardines.
  • The lowest standard of living conditions you can happily put up with. My place came with some warped floorboards, mold behind the sink, some broken oven fans and dim lights. It doesn't bother me, but I know it could really get to some people.
  • Whether you want somewhere furnished or unfurnished. Furnished does cost more, but it can end up saving you a lot in regards to moving your own furniture and buying your own stuff. However, if you're particularly resourceful, you can get most household items for next to nothing. I'll elaborate more on this in my next blog, where I teach you all about furnishing your new digs for next to nothing.
Thinking about these things sooner rather than later can prevent you from making a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately, because I'm not the most financially-minded person in the world, I ended up moving to a place that has a much higher rent than I can comfortably afford. However, because I'm in walking distance from my university and the nearest shopping centre , it's not as terrible as it could be. I just have to be a bit more careful with my money than I'd prefer.

No more burning money to stay warm for this uni student!

In regards to the physical act of house hunting itself, do not underestimate how stressful it is, especially if you have some distance to travel to do it. I drove to Brisbane probably about ten times in the course of a month to try and find somewhere to live. Every single fucking time, I felt like I was on a journey to hell. Driving for two hours or more straight in summer inside a car that has no air conditioning does not put you in a great mood. Add in trying to drive around a strange city where no one knows how to adhere to road rules with a faulty navigation system plus three dehydrated teenage girls and it clusters together into a veritable fuckload of stress. While you won't be able to completely avoid thoughts of destroying all of humanity (especially Queenslander drivers), here are some tips that may make your miserable experience a little more bearable:

  •  Bring a lot of water with you, as well as snacks, or at least plan to stop somewhere to eat and relax. Driving around is tiring enough without being hungry and dehydrated too. Trust me, you'll really need to be able to concentrate, and no one's concentration is improved by being thirsty and irritable.
  • Do not try to see too many places in one day. I found that I could comfortably see about three houses per day with about a hour's break in between each viewing. Any more than that and I had a substantially higher risk of murdering anything I laid eyes upon. Basically, know your limits.
  • Try not to rely just on your GPS or smart phone to guide you to wherever you need to be, because if technology is going to fuck up, it'll fuck up at the most inappropriate time (such as when you're stuck at an intersection with no clue what lane you're supposed to be in while the entire population of Brisbane is stuck behind you, honking their horns). I made sure to print out maps of the routes I needed to take to get from house to house, and it saved my ass more than a few times. Sometimes there really is no substitute for having everything on paper.
  • Make time to have a little fun. Sure, you're house hunting, but there's still time to do something enjoyable. The highlight of my house hunting experience was finding a playground near a river and just chilling out with my future house mates. It transformed a pretty shitty day into one that was still pretty awful, because fuck house hunting, but at least I didn't end up trying to drive my car into the side of a building.
Thank you playground, for once again preventing me from committing mass homicide.


Now here's probably one of the hardest parts about finding your own place... waiting to know if you've been rejected or not. And to be brutally honest, if you have no prior history of renting, it's likely that even if you do everything right, you will probably not get accepted for a lot of places. Personally, I was turned down for about fifteen places before I finally got my hands on somewhere to live. Even then, I jumped the gun, because by that stage, I was getting pretty desperate. Wait it out if you can, because one of the biggest risks of taking whatever offer you're given is getting swindled. There are a lot of crooked real estate agents out there who will pounce on unsuspecting students and their equally clueless parents. If you have any doubts about the place or your potential landlord, avoid taking it if you can. Waiting is well worth avoiding a lot of fuckery and financial bullshit later on.

That concludes the first installment of my guide to being a first year university student! Hopefully you learned something from my mistakes, and if not, had a good laugh at how hopeless I am. Stay tuned for my latest post in a week's time, where I write a love letter to Kmart's home maker brand for helping me furnish my kitchen on a shockingly small budget.

Penniless and poverty-stricken,

The Socially Awkward First Year.