References ?

[Guest Flo]

Hi,

 

since I assume that rental agents & landlords will ask for references when I am looking for a normal rental, I just wanted to ask how exactly this works in Australia / Adelaide ?

 

Is it sufficient to provide contact information of your previous landlord/Rental agent ? Or do I need to directly provide a statement / letter (so I would have to ask my current landlord for one when I move ?)

 

Thanks

[Guest Adelaide_bound]

You can bring along a letter and receipts for past rent paid in the UK if you have them - they won't bother contacting anyone in the UK (time differences; takes too long; too difficult as they really only want to speak to them on the phone; they don't really value something from overseas), if you have a reference from Aus it really really helps - maybe the person you are staying with/renting from for your short term rental here? We used the guys who we were renting from from Air Bnb (students! lol) and that was fine.

 

You should have receipts from your rent paid in the UK anyway - I gave 2 years worth, gut feeling is I'm not sure how helpful all that was (after all I guess you could fake all that if you wanted, especially as our agent in the UK used a hotmail email address lol), I think it was the letter I wrote explaining who we were etc and what our wages etc would be, and the reference on the phone from the AirBnB guy and a friend we have who lives in Perth who we stayed with for a couple of weeks.

[bj27]

the landlady of our furnished rental (for the first few weeks after our arrival) offered herself to be a referee. But what helped us most I think was the fact that we asked the real estate agent straight after the inspection if we could come with her to settle the paperwork. We had a package with everything that was needed (you can find that on the internet or at the website of the agent) and some extra. The agent made a few phonecalls, while we were sitting there, including to the 'old' landlady and the 'new' landlord, and he agreed. So we left our little furnished room in the morning to go to an inspection, and had a contract when we came back in the afternoon! TBH, it's not the best house, but it's affordable and we wanted to start in a safe place in case finances wouldn't work out as expected. The good thing is that it gave us a chance to save a bit of money for a deposit...