If you’re looking to rent a place in Australia, REFind is your best friend. It aggregates places to rent off all the major real estate sites, but it also shows you price reductions (by how much and when) and the length of time advertised. These are great pieces of information as you’ll get a much better deal if you can find a place that has been advertised for a long time as the landlord will be (even more) desperate to get someone in.

On the topic of renting, I still stand by my view that Australian real estate is grossly overpriced, which has been continually confirmed by The Economist Magazine, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Chairman of one of the world’s largest funds managers Jeremy Grantham.

It’s easy to observe the craziness when you compare total cost of renting to total cost of buying.

For example, there are four brand new townhouses around the corner from us at South Brisbane. They plan on selling them one-by-one, but in over three months, they haven’t had any luck even selling the first! They reduced the price of the first townhouse from $2.85 million to $2.79 million, or $60,000 less, but still can’t sell it.

They’ve recently listed it to rent, and in a month have dropped the weekly rent from $2200 to $1600. To put the $1600 weekly rent into perspective, at current rates the repayments on $2.79 million are just under $5000 per week. If interest rates rise 1% over the next 12 months, the weekly repayment rises to just under $5500 per week. Plus there would be other costs involved in owning such as rates, water and property maintenance.

Renting this place for $1600 per week is well over 3 times cheaper, just on repayments, and taking into account other expenses and interest rate increases, would more likely be 5-6 times cheaper! And people still think we don’t have a house price bubble. Crazy.