To try and bring us a little more up to speed I thought I’d write a note on the joys of finding a house to rent in Western Australia.

This is the largest entry I have written here at getting down under so when you get to the bottom of the page, click on the page numbers at the bottom to go to the next page in this entry.

There have been many stories about house prices in Western Aus (Especially Perth).

It is being reported that the five year house price boom is over, however its still expected that Perth will overtake Sydney as Australia’s most expensive city for home-buyers.

Recently, the median house price in Perth has surged 39 per cent to over $491,000 (approx £200,000), in the 12 months to September 2006 and over 500 people are entering Western Australia both from abroad and the East coasts looking for work and somewhere to live.

More interestingly for people looking to rent, it may be worth while keeping in mind that in and around Perth, house SALES have reduced by nearly 50% in the last 12 months. Many analysts put this down to the prices of many properties becoming out of the reach of the first time buyers. For me this means if they aren’t buying then they must be renting…..great!

I guess when we planned our move to Australia we were a little naive when it came to how long it would take us to find a suitable property. In the 12 months prior to entering Australia we had a good look through may of the Australian Real estate web sites to get an idea of the properties available to rent. There were hundreds of properties and the initial enquiries we made earlier in the year indicated that we wouldn’t be hard pressed to find somewhere nice pretty quickly.

When we arrived in Australia just under a month ago we rented a ‘holiday rental’ in a place called Mindarie Keys. Mindarie is about 15 minutes drive North of Sorrento, the place we stayed when we did our Rekkie and Visa activation in February. Its a beautiful little suburb with a man made harbour at its centre with easy access to a large shopping centre and the city via car or train, the latter of which can be caught from the train station in the nearby town of Clarkson.

We’d never been so far north before, when we were here in February I think we drove up about as far as Ocean Reef which is about 10 minutes south of Mindarie. We really liked the place although for us it was a little too far from the city and the little lads school to be a convenience. It was also a little too quiet for us. Mindarie appears to be a popular spot for those lucky enough to have a second ‘holiday’ home and has a large population of retirees also living there. Its a really nice place but not quite home material.

Anyway, onto the house search. I had managed to cheekily ‘piggyback’ onto someone’s wireless internet connection from the house we rented. Unfortunately I could only get a signal sat in the downstairs bathroom but it was good enough to do a daily search on realestate.com.au to identify the latest properties that had come onto the market.

We organised an Australia PAYG Mobile with Vodafone within the first week of being here. This meant we could be contactable and also had the means to quickly call estate agents to arrange viewings.

We were targeting areas within a commutable distance of the school that our little boy starts in January. A place called Iluka was recommended to me and having seen the suburb it quickly became one of our favourite areas.

Iluka (pronounced eye-luke-a) is a pretty, modern looking suburb with a really nice park at its heart. The houses are modern and expensive (to buy) although rentals can be picked up at a half decent price.

We identified a property which was being shown during an ‘open day’ which is basically a day and a set time when the estate agent turns up at the house to let interested parties view it. You turn up at the same time and have a look around and if interested you pick up and complete an application form which you present to the estate agent the following day with your application deposit.

The application deposit is typically the equivalent of one weeks rent and is basically put in place to stop potential tenants from showing an interest, being accepted by the owner and then deciding not to proceed.

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