Housing

Housing is the key challenge in Australia. For various reasons, property is ridiculously expensive and as the saying goes “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”.

Most people choose to rent initially, for a number of reasons:

• If you have a temporary visa, you’re considered foreign buyer. At the time of writing, in NSW that incurred a 8% extra surcharge on the price of a house, unless it’s a new build. So on top of a crazy price, you’d need to spend another 8%. If you have PR you don’t have that extra cost.
• You might not be sure where you want to live, so test out an area and see if it fits.
• At the time of writing, renting is currently far cheaper than paying the mortgage for the same house. Check if that’s true for your location.

Where to live

We have a young child, so went with the school and rough area first and then chose a house that was in the catchment area for that school. This is a very useful site: https://heatmaps.com.au It has a ton of excellent information on house prices, rent prices, income, crime.

This map is fantastic: https://www.mapnificent.net/sydney/

It shows you how far you can get using public transport in a given amount of time, e.g. 15 minutes, 40 minutes. Often, further places are faster to get to than nearer places because of trains.

Renting

There are fantastic websites in Australia with a lot of information on each property. In some cases you can see historic purchase prices, photos from previous sales, etc. You can search for houses in a catchment area. Take a look at https://www.domain.com.au or https://www.realestate.com.au

Top tip: we used https://sydneyrentalsearch.com from South Africa. Paid a few hundred dollars to get a massive reduction in stress. Marcelle has good relations with many agents and can make the process a lot easier. I get no financial benefit in saying so.

Downsize

Every bedroom you add, increases your rent. Units are cheaper than houses.

People often store stuff in their garage and park the car outside. I find it a bit annoying because half the road is cars, which makes driving harder. It’s a rational choice because given the high property prices and relatively low crime rate, people push their storage requirements into the shared area. You’ll find boats, trailers and cars all lined up on the side of the road.