As some of you may be aware, both myself and Tori have been in search of living quarters in melbourne. This is a fairly tedious and gruelling task as apparently every other uni student who doesnt already have a place to live has the same idea and wants to live in the same areas as we do.
This hunting has led me to draw some fairly drastic, but fair, conclusions about real estate agents, advertising and house hunting in general.
1. Don’t trust a website. Just because a house looks great in the 1 photo showing the front of it, doesnt mean that it will be liveable inside. A perfect house may turn out to be a money pit with door-less bedrooms, black, diseased showers, kitchens that look like, well, nothing, chickens running loose in the never mown backyard and a blackened roof from cigarettes. Oh and i guess holes in between the wooden walls is a bad sign too.
2. Real Estate Agents suck. At this one house i checked out with my dad the real estate agent was late. He drove into the driveway in his black BMW in excessively formal attire and smirked at the 12 or so people that had gathered to inspect the property. This property was the dump i previously described so i guess he knew that we were all in for a major shock and probably thought we were ridiculous. So there he was, knocking on the front door waiting for the occupants to let us in. Once we were inside, he just stood there, at the door, watching with delight at how easily people can be sucked in by false advertising. Not only had he described this place in a very enticing way, he acted as if it was going to be hard to get because they’d had a “large amount of interest”. At the end of the day, he knew he could just get back into his Beamer and go home to his large house and feel good about misleading poor uni students into potentially spending their earnings on a place that would be better served by a wrecking ball.
3. Talk to the others who are looking. This just makes it easy to laugh at how ridiculous the house was, once you leave and walk back to your cars, and also confirms that it really was as bad as u thought it was.
CONCEPT: 5/5 – actually looking at a house can provide you with a deep insight into what you can get for the money you are willing to pay and also allows you some fun stories to relay to others when conversations get dull… “hey (insert name), have you ever been house hunting?”
INNOVATION: 2/5 – not really a new concept as such, just provides a new way of looking at estate agents and their consciences.
SATISFACTION: 4/5 - I thoroughly enjoy looking at these dumps. It makes you realise just how lucky you are with what you’ve got. And on a selfish note, you get to laugh and be completely stunned at how some people actually live. A 5/5 would be actually finding a house to live in.
EXECUTION: 3 /5 – Finding the place can be a challenge, but after careful planning and mapping, it can be an adventure into new places.
FUN FACTOR: 2/5 – Whilst it is fun to look at squalor, i can think of many other things i’d much rather do, like sticking my head in the freezer on a hot day.
OVERALL: 6/10 – These excursions can be fun, particuarly when with friends or family who are generally very clean people. You get some very priceless expressions.
This is the house that Jack built (or needs to demolish)
