house hunting
I thought I could go it alone. I thought if I just spent enough time I could crack the Hong Kong housing madness and find some super bargain amazing place. With an average rent of $18,000 HKD per month (apx $800 per week NZ) this place is no joke. The rent paid is also an inverse relationship to house size, NZ average house size is 149 square metres… Hong Kong is a mere 44. To try and imagine 44 square metres, if you just had one rectangle room as your whole house, the short walls would be 5.7m long and the long walls would be 7.8m long.
After a few mind numbing days in the hotel room trawling through websites, joining all the house hunting facebook groups and getting rather overwhelmed I managed to have arranged ONE viewing. Everything is done via Whatsapp here so after a quick chat with the real estate agent he advised I could just rock up and look whenever I wanted as it wasn’t locked. How convenient I thought… and also how strange. But anyway off I went. I was so hopeful, as I walked up to it I was taking photos of the building from different angles imagining myself messaging my family to say “look at the crazy tall building we will be living in”. There was some street art proclaiming love of the area, I had convinced myself this was true (if only to end the hunt) and took photos of that too.
I realised as I was nearly there that I had forgotten my passport, the only thing I actually needed, to show building security so they’d let me see the house. Oh well I thought, I’ve come this far, lets give it a go. So I pulled out a photo of my passport on my phone and boom too easy, security let me jump in the elevator and head up to the 40th or so floor. I found the right place, walked in, and nearly turned and walked straight back out. It smelled like wet laundry left for way too many days in the machine. It was hot as anything with zero air flow. It was full of utterly random crap that the previous tenants had left behind (with good reason). It was dirty, not just a layer of dust but a serious case of not having been cleaned upon departure, especially the kitchen and bathroom. It was my first real taste of the size of the apartments here, throwing around square feet measurements to a NZ lass is unhelpful at the best of times, but as I am terrible at imagining space I really didn’t know what we were getting in for. This thing was small. Space for a couch, a shelf and a small dining table in the main room, space for 1 person at a time to stand in the kitchen. Barely space to stand in the bathroom, one of those awkward ones where you almost have to climb into the bath or sit on the toilet to get enough space to close the door behind you. The first bedroom had a built in single bed against the longer wall of the room which the door nearly scraped when I opened it, a small closet took the rest of the floor space. The second bedroom had a built in double bed and a built in wardrobe but you’d be doing a sideways shimmy to walk up your side of the bed. All the rooms had additional bonus items like towels, kids toys, blankets, buckets. All of which looked well used and gave the place a far too personal feel. I took a video just to be able to laugh/cry at it later. The video doesn’t really capture the essence of it at all though, it was an experience to say the least.
Next stop on the house hunting trail were 2 viewings: a place that we heard about through a friend that a Pilot was renting out, and a place I saw on Facebook where they were wanting to break their lease early so it was a bit of a “bargain”. We arranged to go look at them, the first one was awesome: relatively big, open kitchen, balcony, really cool airport and ocean views, spacious bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (we will be sharing with a friend), fully furnished, immaculately clean, well priced, really nice landlord, great facilities (pool, tennis courts, gym, bowling alley etc.). The second one was in an extremely fancy building, with multiple layers of security to get in, giant chandeliers, sweeping sea views, pools, tennis courts etc. However when we got to the actual house the guy answered holding a small dog with what looked suspicioiusly like dog pee on his t-shirt which if you are not the biggest fan of dogs is not the most auspicious start. The 3 of us crowded into the house where there was the guy, his wife, an older woman, another dog and a sleeping baby somewhere too. They were very lovely people but we couldn’t see the wood for the trees in this place, or more accurately couldn’t see the apartment for the stuff. The place was jam packed full, layers of boxes stacked right to the ceiling, furniture in every spare space. It was hard to look around with all the extra bodies in the house and honestly… it smelled like dog. So as fancy as the building was, and as ok as the apartment perhaps could have been if we could have seen it properly, we all knew this one was a no go. At first it seemed logical we will take the awesome one right?
But something wasn’t sitting right for me, it was partly the location, whilst extremely handy to the airport its around 60-90mins to get to the city centre and I was worried about isolating ourselves. Also I didn’t have a job yet so what if I ended up working on the other side of the city centre and commuting for hours each day. In the end those things were too uncomfortable for me so I said to the guys, sorry but I can’t commit (here you typically sign up for 2 year leases with the option of breaking it after 1 year). We thought we would try and see if he would let us take it for just 6 months but he had another group interested and managed to get them to commit to 2 years so it was bye-bye awesome house and back to the drawing board.
It was extremely frustating looking for houses without knowing where I was going to be working as any place we took could be setting me up for hours of commuting each day. With Pilot life meaning only a few commutes a month we weren’t as concerned about being close to the airport but other than that didn’t really know where to look! Size wise Hong Kongs land area (i.e. if you don’t count all the water) is about the same size as Auckland’s so its like trying to find a rental in Auckland without narrowing down the suburbs you’re looking in. Just a little tricky. So we decided to call in a professional and get an agent to help. Figuring they would be able to help rule out certain areas for all sorts of things we wouldn’t know or have thought about, and maybe proactively suggest certain areas. We found a lovely woman who has lived in Hong Kong for 20 years, spent her childhood in Switzerland and 5 years working in New Zealand, so we figured she would understand us somewhat. We gave her our list of wishes, some of which she dashed immediately (double glazing so the pilots can sleep during the day, a balcony/rooftop, open kitchen, nice views) saying if we tried to get all those things we would never find a place and just to consider them bonuses if we got them.
So the hunt now really began in earnest. First viewing day was up in the mid-levels, saw 3 quite spacious places but we didn’t really feel the vibe and they were on the absolute upper limits of our budget. Next trip was into Causeway Bay where I saw two places, both reasonably spacious and the area had a good feel but they both gave me claustrophobic vibes due to the lack of windows and again the budget was being pushed to it’s limits.
Next day out was in Mei Foo, was supposed to see 3 places there, but only saw 2. This was because when we turned up at the first place the local agent who was accompanying us couldn’t get his key to work. He ran around a bit and made some calls and tried again and in the end both agents concluded that the house had been leased over night and the locks changed…. talk about a fast moving rental market! The other two places were both quite cool, more spacious than what we had seen, and with a few of our wish list items included and the price point met they could have been an option. When we were looking at one of them, the elderly occupants were home, including an old fulla sitting at a desktop computer with no shirt on and the screens full of numbers. We were informed by his son showing us around that he was working the stock market “to keep his mind healthy in his old age”! Having seen the two apartments we wandered around the area somewhat on our way back to the station, the agent pointing out to me that this was a very “local” area. Now we said we didn’t want to live in a fully expat area and I am all for trying to integrate into a new place but this felt like everyday life would be quite a battle without speaking Cantonese, and I don’t think its going to be an easy to learn language! We decided our first place in Hong Kong needed to be somewhere slightly less “local”, as weird as that sounds. So the search continued.
Now until this point I had been doing all these viewings just with our agent as the guys are hard at work learning how to fly giant airplanes. But with a day off coming up our soon-to-be flatmate sent us off for a day with a local agent whose details he got from a friend. She lined up a huge day of viewings spanning what felt like the length of Hong Kong. I am not going to lie, the day is a bit of a blur, I don’t even know how many houses we saw in the end but I know the outcomes:
We were too early to meet her in the morning so googled “coffee shop” to find somewhere to escape the heat while we waited and lucked upon an awesome breakfast/coffee place that we will definitley return too (see pics below).
We realised agents don’t always show you what you want, the specification she had been given was 3 bedrooms, for a couple and a single to share, and a gym in the building. We saw no places with a gym, and we saw plenty of places where only one room was big enough for a double bed, leaving our flattie with a teeny room.
We didn’t find an apartment that day.
Getting slightly over this whole business I thought maybe the 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms was too hard and we would be better going it alone and getting a place just for the two of us. So I asked our agent to set us up a day of viewings focused on that instead. I believe we looked at 12 places that day, the length of Hong Kong Island. I liked a few of them actually, they were small (but thats less of an issue with 2 people) and some of them had some great shared outdoor spaces. I circled 3 on the list that I thought were worth both of us having a look at and proudly took my list home. At this time I also conveniently got a job so we finally knew where I would be working, the puzzle pieces were falling into place. Somehow, weirdly, I don’t know exactly how but this all ended up (without us even going to look at the places together) with us knowing that we wanted to live in Kennedy Town! So we asked the agent to please show the both of us any and every place they could come up with in Kennedy Town for either the 2 of us, or with flatmate, and booked in a day of viewings. In the interim I was getting impatient and was stuck inside with a Typhoon raging so I started contacting places I saw on the internet directly. My agent had warned me off the house hunting websites as she said there are usually fake, expired and duplicate listings so it can be a bit of a minefield. She wasn’t entirely wrong but I managed to cobble together a day of viewings while sitting out a Typhoon so that seemed hopeful. We saw one potential yes and a few no-gos, and added another 6 or so viewings to the ever growing list.
Next day we decided this was the last day of house hunting and if we found nothing we would take the yes place from the day before. I had hooked up again for us to see a few viewings from the websites, plus we had our official ones with our agent too so another full on day of viewings. Again I lost count on this day of how many places we saw and my brain was mushy and overloaded, but at 9:30pm at night sitting in desparation at MacDonalds we weighed our pros and cons, called our flatmate and made a decision! I messaged the agent and then we endured the waiting game of seeing if it is still available (yes, phew), then bargaining on rent and fixes to be done to the house (sorted, yay), then trying to sign bits of paper and transfer money for a few days until…. it was done! Apartment locked and loaded. I cannot begin to explain the pleasure I took in deleting housing apps off my phone, leaving all the facebook groups and unsubscribing from email alerts!
Our new place is 60 square metres, has 3 bedrooms (1 for visitors!), 2 bathrooms, an open plan kitchen/living area, a breakfast bar, a living area that fits a couch AND a dining table, a pool that we can use in summer, it is in Kennedy Town and it is quite reasonably priced by HK standards ($1,342 NZ per week), which shared amongst 3 people is all good in the hood.
