Kate Stewart: House hunt highlights a shocking situation

I'm fairly sure that I've just endured the most stressful week of my life.

Moving house is a pain in the butt at the best of times but for me, it was a case of anything that could go wrong, did go wrong, with multiple sour cherries on top!

It also brought to my attention, what a shocking supply and demand problem we have with regard to good, affordable residential rental properties.

Too many tenants and not enough homes. Ironic really, just as there have been murmurs of selling off state and council housing.

Even when you find a property you like, you find yourself competing with 50 other hopefuls, all embarking on the same mission.

You can no longer just rock up to view a house at a jointly agreed upon time. Property managers advise you of a sole showing and you're unceremoniously herded through, like cattle, then pitted against one another to become the chosen one. Filling out various forms, authorising vigorous checks and providing multiple references.

I'm surprised they didn't also request a signature in blood and the promise of a first born child!

This positively depressing process affords the property managers to pick the absolute cream of the crop. Most don't even have the common decency to advise you whether your application has been successful or not and they frequently leave newly tenanted properties up on their various websites for weeks, giving often desperate people false hope that still may be in with a chance. It's quite unprofessional and arrogant, in my opinion.

And don't even try to figure out how they come to some of the rent amounts being asked. If there's some magic equation or formula then I'm obviously too bloody thick to work it out.

I've seen beautifully modern, fully furnished 5-6 bedroom properties, complete with linens and every small home appliance known to man, going for less than a tired and much shabbier, starkly empty 2-3 bedroom house. It's all rather bizarre and mystifying.

During my search, available properties on Trade Me fluctuated from anywhere between 27 to 44, with at least 70 per cent being non-starters due to unaffordability or the fact they were also on the market.

With Winz already accommodating local families in motels as emergency housing at the taxpayers expense, one must question their decision to offer financial rewards for benefit reliant families to move out of places like Auckland to ease their burden of overcrowding during a shocking housing shortage.

One copy of the Saturday Chronicle I looked at didn't have a single listing in the Houses To Let column. Talk about slim pickings.

We don't even have sufficient properties for local families. Why compound the problem by encouraging more people on the breadline into the city.

Meanwhile, we have state homes sitting empty and council flats that could be full and making money if they weren't conditional on that word - pensioner.

It's madness, I tell you, and quite honestly I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Maybe it's time that a few of these agencies got together to look at the possibility of pooling resources. Surely, if nothing else, the council flats could be used as a more cost effective emergency housing for singles and small families.

Employ some common sense and help the ever growing number of the nearly homeless, before more arrive on our doorstep.

Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones but only made it with days to spare. For the others out there on the hunt, you have my utmost sympathies.

Best of luck.

- Kate Stewart is a politically incorrect columnist of no repute investik8@gmail.com