Typical Sydney Terraced House

We will not have a permanent home lined up for our arrival in Sydney, so as we had to do when moving to London, we will arrange for temporary housing. A place to hang a hat, sleep and feed our family. It needn’t be fancy but preferably clean and central to make house hunting and neighbourhood investigating easier.

We have been provided with a relocation company to sort out just these sorts of details to make the transition to a new country easier. Among other things they will help us communicate with schools and answer questions about setting up accounts–the basics

We emailed our consultant about the neighbourhoods that we are most interested in moving to hoping that we could find temporary housing close by. She replied within a few days recommending a 2 week stay at a serviced apartment near to Bondi. We open their website eager to sort out this portion of our move only to be completely flabbergasted by the price: $15,000-$18,000 per month!  It was completely out of our budget and we were concerned that it may take us longer than two weeks to find a permanent home.

I’m sure the $18k/month high-rise serviced apartment would have been luxurious, but it wouldn’t really set the right expectations with our family.  We aren’t planning to live in a high rise with a doorman.  We want a little urban bungalow or terraced house with at least a tiny bit of outdoor space.  It was a bit of a miss on the part of the relo company both on substance and cost.

We decided to skip the relocation consultant for this one and turned to Airbnb.  We settled on a small three-bedroom house in Paddington for about three weeks.  It’s still over our budget, but much more palatable.  If our search for a permanent home takes longer, we’ll simply find another Airbnb which may also be a good way for us to try out a different neighbourhood.