In my last blog post I wrote about how much rental properties cost on the Gold Coast. In this post I’ll tell you how you actually find and apply for a rental property. When I first arrived, the internet wasn’t widespread yet, so I looked for a property by going in person to real estate agents to get their lists of rental properties and I checked the rental property sections in the newspapers. Nowadays, you simply search realestate.com.au, Australia's largest real estate website. You can select the area you want and narrow your search by choosing your budget, the type of property (e.g., house, apartment), and various other options. In Australia, apartments are also called “units.” And as well as apartments there are townhouses, which are houses built-for-sale with the same construction style and that resemble a compact version of a freestanding house. The number of rooms is displayed by the number of “beds” as “1 bed,” or “2 beds.” The prices displayed are weekly prices. Apart from the rent, you also have utility charges in Australia, but in Queensland, although you pay for electricity, gas, and telecommunications (telephone and internet) yourself, water bills may be paid by the property owner, depending on the conditions. I live in a rental property, but the owner pays all the water bills. Quite a large proportion of properties do not have gas and are electric only, as hot plates are now available that use induction or electric coils instead of a gas stove in the kitchen and use electric hot water tanks for hot water. Share houses are no longer uncommon in Japan these days, but in Australia it has long been common practice for a number of people to live together in an apartment or house, so some two-bedroom (2LDK) apartments have two toilets and two showers, while some even have a garage for two cars. That’s why every property shows how many bedrooms, bathrooms, and car spaces it has. You can also search by the date you can move into properties, and if you find a property you like, you can go for an inspection. You can register for inspections online and real estate agents that hold inspections open to the public also make the inspection schedules publicly available, so anyone who wants to go and see the property at those times is free to go and take a look. There can be as many as 20 people attending an inspection for a single property if it is a popular one. If you make an application, you fill out a rental application form or you enter the details online. The details you fill out include the full names of all the people intending to live at the property, their birth dates, driver license numbers, occupations, company names, current addresses, emergency contacts, and the name and contact details of a referee, etc. Other information may include your addresses over the last few years and, if you are renting, the contact details for the relevant real estate agents, the make, model, and license plate numbers of any cars you own, your bank name, branch name, current income, and contact details for your manager at work. Apart from the application form, you may also need to submit copies of your driver's license, passport, bank statement, and a copy of a utility bill showing your current address. The details you have to fill in and the documents you have to submit differ depending on the real estate agent, so while some agents are OK with general details, others make you fill in minute details. Tough agencies make you fill out details like the real estate agents for any rental properties you have lived in over the last 10 years and their details (addresses, email addresses, rents, how long you lived there, why you moved), and so on, in which case just looking up those details will take time. In the meantime, other applicants might put in an application which could mean you’d be too late, so when I was looking for a rental property, I used to carry all this information around with me, so if I found a property I liked, I would fill out an application form straight away, and I would carry plenty of copies of my documents with me so I could get them out straight away. Of course, handing over your documents sooner doesn’t mean you have an advantage, but I used to submit my documents sooner just thinking that you don’t know how much care the real estate agent will take when looking at all the application forms for a property whose competitive rate is 10 or 20 times higher, and the deadline might be sooner because there are too many applications. By the way, you might be thinking only Australian citizens and permanent residents can rent a rental property, but that isn’t the case. Even foreigners who hold a long-term visa, like a student visa or a business visa, can rent a property. As I mentioned in my last post, the number of people moving to the Gold Coast is steadily increasing every year, so you’ll have a hard time renting a house because of the strong competition. No matter how much you like a property, it comes down to the question of whether you will or won’t be chosen from among the large number of applicants. I know more than a few people who say they couldn't find a place to live despite going to dozens of inspections and putting in applications. COVID-19 has also forced more people to put their homes up for sale or to switch them over to rental properties because they can’t repay their loans. On the other hand, I have heard that more and more new houses are fast being built and sold because the Australian government is implementing policies such as subsidies up to 40,000 dollars (about 3.12 million yen) to people who are buying their first new single-family home, so I guess future developments in the economy will mean the real estate situation will change even further.