Dear Diary,

I am sooo depressed. You know how I received the email from my property manager 5 months ago that my landlord will be increasing my rent by 46%; $230 per week to $730. I can’t afford paying this townhouse anymore and thus have been trying to find a new home.

These last 5 months, despite constantly scouring the rental websites like real estate.com, there are so few units available in the areas that I want to live. When I finally find a potential home, just trying to get inside a unit for an inspection is proving to be a hardship, with hundreds of prospective tenants lining up merely to inspect the rental.  The queues go on and on and on down the street and beyond! By the time I get home after a couple of inspections, these units have been leased! I have looked over 48 properties and still haven’t found my new home. It’s impossible to find a place to live!

I read that in January 2023, the vacancy rate for Melbourne and Sydney is 1%, from data from Domain.

Leo Patterson Ross, Chief Executive Officer of the Tenants’ Union of New South Wales, said it’s the worst rental crisis he’s seen, with people feeling distressed and hopeless about finding a place to live.

Apparently the situation isn’t much better in the United States either. A Zillow survey found that more than two-thirds of recent renters found that signing up their current rental was harder than getting a job! In New York City in January 2023, people waited 90 minutes just to view a one-bedroom apartment the size of a single-car garage that was going for a staggering $2,337.39!

What am I going to do? Am I going to be homeless soon as I cannot afford continuing to pay for my present home? Even when I find a unit that I can afford, I will have to pay about $4000 to move according to tenants union data. Where am I going to find this amount? Everything is so expensive now, I do not have any savings! Argh……..

Hang on. I remembered reading some strategies in Smart Her Change’s blog to help stand out in this highly competitive rental market, yet still be able to enjoy my life comfortably.

It read:

•  Before you start searching for a place to rent, calculate how much you can afford to pay. A good rule of thumb is that your rent       shouldn’t exceed 30% of your weekly take-home pay. That’s 0.3* your income.
• Look for a property that is within your budget   
• Move further out of your desired neighbourhood or rethink the type of home you want to live in.
• Organise an early private inspection with the leasing agent immediately once the property is listed
•  According to Zillow’s survey, besides the strategies we suggested above, 30% said paying at least two months’ rent in advance helped them win their most recent rental 

Good luck!

I shall follow all the suggested strategies. At least I don’t feel so hopeless now, as I have some control over what I can do to give myself a better chance.

My next diary entry will show how my application was approved!

Ladies, let’s make “Smarther” Change together by increasing our financial knowledge and taking control of our finances

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