It has begun, home computer will be offline for a while until the phone is connected and an internet service is provisioned at the new place.

This afternoon Claire and I raced up to Brogan & Ryan Real Estate at Robina to sign the lease for our new home. When we arrived, the real estate agent was polite and didn’t make us wait around at all. In fact, she was so organised I commented to her that she was the most organised real estate agent I had ever seen. We walked into an office and she had with her, all neatly organised and in a folder:

• all of our paper work
• the documents were marked for signing
• the documents were stamped so everyone knew which copies they were taking home
• a little bag full of keys
• photocopies of all of the keys, so we both had records of what keys we actually did receive
• a pet agreement, awesome!
• the mandatory documentation by the Rental Tenancies Authority
• contact information for contractors if we needed any repairs done

It might not seem all that mind blowing, however every other real estate agent we’ve dealt with in the past paled by comparison. I hope that any future deals we have with Brogan & Ryan are as smooth as this process was.

Claire and I live in an apartment/townhouse at the Gold Coast, with people on both our side walls and above us. We’ve been in our current apartment since December 2004 and we’ve discussed moving into something different.

That idea got put onto the hot plate this week when I called our new on site managers and asked about what I needed to do for them to move out. That discussion lead into us exchanging information about our apartment and her finding out for the first time that it is actually for sale. She was a little shocked about that, since the real estate agent hasn’t informed her nor have they been going to her to get to get a key for our apartment to show people through it.

Being a little confused by the whole thing, she started calling around to find out what was going on. We were very surprised to find out that our apartment has in fact been sold for over a month now and that the Gold Coast real estate agent didn’t think it important to inform the body corporate managers or the current tenants! You can probably guess what is coming next, the new owners intend to move into their new investment in about two weeks.

With that much notice, we’re now hunting at a fairly rapid pace for a new home to move into at the Gold Coast somewhere. We’re not interested in moving into another gated complex, nor are we fussed on sharing walls with people again. Our neighbours in the last two and a half years have been far too inconsiderate to want to go through that again, so we’re looking for a standard house.

We’ve submitted an application to a nice four bedroom house in Pacific Pines, cross your fingers we get it.