Be Vewwy, Vewwy Quiet...

...we're hunting wental pwoperties...

We're familiar with this process, because we rented houses in West Los Angeles.

We're familiar with this process because we bought houses during the boom period in Marin County.

We're familiar with the fleeting bits of joy and apprehension that you constantly cycle through while hunting for a place to live in markets where the houses move fast, stay on the market for only moments, and are snapped up by others before you can even get a look at them.

So we're familiar with the Wellington City Area rental market, even though we're very new here.

I'm sitting here wracking my brain trying to come up with an analogy for it. I think of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland where the soldiers had to run as fast as they could just to stay in place. It's kind of like that. It's also kind of like playing a game where you throw out all your high scores every day and start fresh. It's also a bit like juggling where some of the balls you're juggling explode and some clown (yeah) is tossing new balls to you now and then.

It's basically a full time job for two people.

A really nice place in Northland showed up on trademe.co.nz yesterday (the highest-traffic site for Wellington area rental postings) and Joanne and I jumped on it. We were out there at the open house by 2pm the day the listing showed up. We put in an application. But we weren't fast enough. Two applications beat us that day, and god knows what other sorts of back-channel dealings were going on elsewhere. No dice! We were good---really good---but not good enough.

One of the keys to this process is to not get too hung up on one particular rental that looks possible or even likely. Getting hung up stops you from being open-minded about new listings and takes some of the wind out of your sails. You'll need that wind to keep the flow of potential listings coming. There seems to be absolutely no way to tell which one will hit, so every new potential rental is at least as good as the last. Maybe better... if you're fast enough. And lucky.