I thought that I would post about this before I forgot everything I learnt while looking for a rental.
There are a number of websites that advertise rental properties. The Australia-wide ones that we were familiar with (from our rental search in Sydney) are realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. Listings often appear on both sites, but realestate.com.au doesn’t accept independent (non agent) listings whereas domain.com.au does.
We were also fairly frustrated with domain.com.au sometimes because of a few “zombie listings”. We ended up contacting agents for places that were already leased (but still listed on domain.com.au). I suspect that the domain.com.au software requires manual de-listing whereas the realestate.com.au software is an integrated solution for agents.
For Western Australia, the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia (REIWA, reiwa.com.au) is a good resource (although the website doesn’t permit opening listing in new windows for some reason). This website is also a good resource for general information on renting.
Finally, we also found that a few big real estate agents (like LJ Hooker) are not part of the realestate.com.au or reiwa.com.au networks, so we started checking individual websites as well. Then we found that many of the missing real estate agents can be found at homehound.com.
However, after all that we ended up finding our place in the paper. How “ironical”.
So to keep your bases covered, be sure to check out:
- reiwa.com.au
- realestate.com.au
- domain.com.au
- homehound.com
- the newspaper
Probably in that order.
Update: Just added a bit more information and the list of links.