home sweet home

Having our first real house-hunting trips behind us, now might be a good time to quickly list a couple of things that could help those out there looking for a place to settle in Sydney.

If you have never visited Sydney before, a good place to start might be cityhobo. It gives a good – and in my experience trustworthy – description about life & style in the different suburbs and it even compares them to types of shoes for those fashionistas among you 😉 Btw, Sydney has around 60 different suburbs in total (!), which can be quite confusing at first, but use those maps regularly and you will get used to it.

Through that site and my own wandering around we’ve restricted our search to the following neighborhoods: Balmain, Glebe, Newtown, Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Woolloomoolloo, Potts Point, Mosman, Cremorne and Kirribilli. Places with each their own character, not too far from our work (either via car or public transport), but not too isolated either…

To actually look for property, whether it be sale or rental, following sites are crucial: realestate and/or domain. I prefer the latter as you can add your own notes to the properties you’ve saved/faved, but both sites lack in flexible search controls. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that real estate agents list their properties mostly on both sites so it does not really matter which of the 2 you use. Private owners use domain.com mostly, but private rentals are few and far between in such a tight market.

As renting in Sydney is rather expensive, another option is to share accommodation. Here flatmatefinders comes in really handy and is really used throughout the city and different layers/generations of the population.
Another site which came recommended to me, gumtree, mostly has private rentals listed. However, not much happening there so I’d stick to the sites mentioned above 😉