A-house-huntin' we go

Pretty soon after you get to university, as has been my experience, you're encouraged to start thinking about where to live next year when we're no longer living in halls of residence. Apparently enquiries from first-year students arrive at the accommodation office earlier and earlier each year, as The Fear is struck into them.

Finding a property through Warwick's accommodation office seems to be a fairly undaunting and smooth process, and has the added benefit that they get a lot of people sorted by January or February. It's very easy to know what's going on, since all their currently-rented houses are rented by students, and they know exactly when the properties will be available (generally vacant between July and September), so they can comfortably arrange for people to move in in seven or eight months' time.

Not so for Kevin and me, unfortunately — Kevin's non-student status meant that Warwick Accommodation wouldn't deal with us. Off to the private landlords then. The problem with having to use private letting agents when you're looking to move in September, however, is that properties generally aren't advertised more than about 4-6 weeks before they become available. We'd obviously like to get this sorted by the end of this term (24th June) while I'm still living up here and Kevin's still visiting every weekend, otherwise we'll be a bit stuck when trying to view houses, what with being 2-3 hours' drive away.

This has led to my scouring many dozens of property websites (and discarding all but the, oh, three and a half that were actually useful) in the past few weeks, and sifting through literally hundreds of properties in the specified area/price range, and guess what? The vast, vast majority of properties have been "available now" or in May, occasionally June. I think I even saw one "late June". Goshwow. (There was also a vast majority of properties that were too far away for me to get to uni by bus, even within my fairly narrow area search, but let's leave that aside for the moment.) June? End of May? We want to move in September! Well, August would be okay, I guess. Okay, July at a push, if we really have to. I suppose.

Still, even with these restrictions we've managed to request viewings for no less than five properties in the last week. Of these, one got back to us four days later saying that the property had been let; one got back to us by email six days later saying that he'd phone us on Saturday to arrange a time; one we're waiting to hear if we can get an appointment; one we made an appointment for and were then told the next day that it had been let; and the last one we actually do have an appointment to view on Saturday. Right after my first exam :-)

I do seem to be drawing the annoying conclusion that if you want to get anywhere, particularly if you want to get anywhere quickly, you need to do things by phone rather than by email. I guess this means I'm going to have to get better at talking to people over the phone, then. Alas, I am cursed to live in a world that prefers talking to typing...