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When Dawn found a job, it was down to me to find a place for us to live! As I quickly found out, in Melbourne this is easier said than done. The rental market is quite a bit different to the UK, in that there are more people looking for places to rent than there are places available!

I began looking close to where Dawn is working, and places not too far away on public transport - but every time I went to an “open for inspection”, there were at least 10 sets of other people looking at the same place The competition was very fierce, even more so for us as we had just arrived in the country and had no history of renting in Australia. So after a few weeks of this, we decided to look further afield - about 25 miles outside of the city centre.

The first place I looked at in this new location, Dawn also accompanied me. There were only 2 other sets of people looking at the house on that day, and we both felt that we could live there so we put in an application the next morning! We knew it was slightly over-priced for the area, but we needed a place and it felt like the right place to be - and we were successful in our application! I’ve got to say, the financial costs are lower in Australia when renting (no agency fees to pay, and also no council tax once you’re living in a place) but finding a place and being successful in getting it is much tougher.

We moved into this house 1 month ago - and have now managed to make this 3-bed house look not quite so empty with our belongings that were shipped from the UK, as well as some furniture from Brisbane. Now we also have a car! We looked around for a while, and were getting desperate for one as public transport isn’t so good. A week ago we took a likely car for a test drive, and bought it from the dealer - so now we also have a set of wheels!

The only thing left now is for me to find a job I did have one lined up through an agency, and attended a training day for this job. But it wasn’t due to start for a few days after the training day, and the day before I was going to start I received a call from the agency saying that the employer no longer needed us (it would have been a team of 8 people starting the following day for a 4-6 month contract). Dawn has been off work without pay the last 2 weeks because her boss was off, but returns to work this Monday.