2024 has been S-Tier so far

Now that I've moved house and mostly settled in, it's time to do something I've been meaning to do: write a blog post.

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At the end of November 2023, my wife and I were given notice from our property manager that our landlord was terminating our tenancy agreement at the end of our lease because they've chosen the sell the property. My immediate reaction to this was panic, followed by a weird sensation in my chest similar to when you're cold and you can feel the warm blood pumping through. It was such a stark change in sensation that the only way I could describe how I felt is scared.

I was scared for a number of reasons.

The biggest reason for me being scared was that we had no money. We'd just come back from a trip interstate that we'd been saving all year for to go to, and our accounts were emptier than Oliver Twist's food bowl. Moving house is such an expensive endeavour, and it still baffles me how people can do it when they're bored of where they live.

Ancillary reasons for being scared is the rental market in its current state and finding a place to live. It's absolutely fucked right now, and I had no idea just how fucked it actually is until we had to go through the rickmarol of finding another place to live. We must have applied for at least 20 different rental properties, and for every property we had applied to, there were at least 15 to 20 people attending the inspections that were mandatory to even start an application.

To provide some context, my wife and I have been renting for about 12 years now. We had no real desire to own a home for a number of reasons, but chiefly, we don't have kids and usually a home is something you would leave to your kids when you die -- at least that's how we view it.

The first place we rented when we moved in together was a two bedroom townhouse unit sharing the land with 9 other units under a strata title. When we applied for it, we got it straight away. It was great for our first place, but two years later we decided to move because the rent for what it was just wasn't worth it. The other reason is that we wanted to adopt a cat as a sort of emotional support animal for my wife, which we were told by the rental agent we could after a short while of being there. But the Strata denied overruled the landlord and said no, so we opted to move to somewhere that would allow us a furry family member.

When we looked around for a new place, we found an older four-bedroom house for the same weekly rent that our townhouse was increasing the rent to. We attended the inspection, which there was nowhere near the amount of people as there was for our most recent inspections. We applied for it and shortly after, we were notified that we were accepted with the included provision to allow us to have pets.

We were happy. We stayed in that four bedroom house for 10 years until the aforementioned notice was given that our tenancy was ending. In the 10 years of living there and calling it home, we had seen the management change hands four or five times and dealt with at least 8 different property managers. Early on, it seemed that property managers changed as often as I change my hairstyle. Some of the property managers we dealt with were really lovely, while others -- not so much.

Circling back, the process for applying for both of our previous properties was simple: Fill out an application, show some identification, and inspect the property. It was so easy then.

Fast forward to today, and it's an absolute nightmare. Everything has changed so much, and it concerns me greatly how much more difficult it is to find somewhere to live.

Most rental applications now are using online third-party services, and the amount of information that they "require" now is baffling. While it varied between the plethora of applications we made, rental agents are now asking for multiple pay slips, between two and five years of previous rental history, five or more years of work history, personal references, professional references, emergency contacts, over 150 points of identification from multiple categories and so much more.

They might as well be asking what colour your semen is or a blood sample. As someone with a life-long passion for technology to a point that he now works in it as a career, I am incredibly concerned by the amount of information that's now "required" by rental agencies -- and with the number of data breaches that have occurred in the last few years, can you blame me?

Over the last few months, I would jokingly make the comparison that it is easier to get financial assistance from a government agency like Centrelink or a government security clearance than it is to apply for a rental property -- and my wife and I are fairly smart. We struggled with some of the online forms and technology that are supposed to make it easier. If we struggled with it, then what about other people who don't share our technical literacy? What chance do they have?

On top of that, some of the services being used for applications try to push extra fees down your throat to improve the chances of your application. Throughout the applications we made, we were prompted to pay $30.00 AUD no less than twice per application after we dismissed the popup. The payment was to verify our identity so the rental agent doesn't have to.

Through the incredibly resilient efforts of my wife, we've secured a new place to live. We're all moved in thanks to the help of our amazing friends who offered their time and energy to help us move our stuff, our adorable cats have settled in, and I've gone back to work after having a week off to sort things out with the old place -- which is still ongoing, two weeks later.

Throughout all of this, my father-in-law had fallen ill and sadly passed away a couple of weeks or so before we moved. My wife is handling it alright, but to say things have been rough is a massive understatement, and the timing of it all couldn't have been any worse. For personal reasons, I won't elaborate on this portion of the post. I just wanted to point out how rough it has been.

In some other not-doom-and-gloom news, the company I work for has recognised my efforts and hard work and I've been promoted from Junior DevOps Engineer to DevOps Engineer. It comes with a reasonably sized pay increase, which couldn't come at a better time given the house move. The stark increase in rent alone consumes most of my paycheck, especially when I try to keep us paid ahead in rent by at least a month.

That's the end of this long, life update. Here's to hoping things start to ease up a bit.