How I've Hot Bedded My Way Through Auckland's Housing Crisis

I was recently pulled over for speeding and couldn't give the cop a residential address. I'm not your traditional homeless person, but that's what I am. I've been without a house for five weeks. I have stayed at nine houses in nine suburbs in that time, firmly cementing my place as a victim of Auckland's housing crisis.

The affordability of Auckland's property market is going from bad to worse. In the last year it climbed from the world's ninth most expensive city to the fifth. The hunt for a rental is fierce and it's pushing prices up. There are horror stories of people bunking in a small room with three others just to cut down on rent. I have many friends in their 20s who straight-up refuse to move out of their family home. It's a luxury that I, as an Auckland immigrant, do not have.

I moved out of my last flat after a year with high and, in hindsight, comically naïve hopes for "mixing it up." All I wanted was a bigger room and a shower sans mould. When my parents asked me what I was going to do, without a plan I said I would stay with friends for a couple of nights.

Guests wear out their welcome fast, so I decided three days was the maximum I would stay at any one house. And thus the hot-bedding commenced:

St Heliers
As I moved in with one friend's parents in St Heliers, I scoured online and IRL for rental properties that my [intended] future flatmates and I could share. We started off fussy. Hey, we could afford it. After three years of small rooms in kinda shit flats as students, we've graduated and we deserve this.

Milford
Progressing on to a Milford manor that was three seconds from the ocean was magical and unrealistic. I showed up with peaches and wine, and they gave me a taste of living like I had never experienced. I went for walks on the boardwalk followed by salt-water pool swims with my host's mother, all the while continuing the search for flats. Everything advertised looked increasingly shit from my temporary luxury home. Nonetheless, morale was high.

Grey Lynn
Being housed in the central suburbs is like nothing else. So is living in a house with seven boys, or at this point roughly 183,920 boys, who had all travelled and stayed for a party. Waking up with a crippling hangover and dragging yourself to a viewing at 9 AM is another kind of hell. I joined a queue of 25 eager souls—all much too chipper for a Saturday morning. Four dudes in their late 20s were all wearing suits. So. Much. Competition.

Mount Eden
I got some sleep here. Then returned the next night to find another hot-bedder in my designated room. Devastating. I called another friend and moved on.

That's me on the right, smiling because I'm asleep, finally. CBD
Sharing someone else's bed is never going to be anything short of a sleepover. Your presence is an anomaly for them, so you need to allocate four hours of hang-out time from when you get home until the time you go to sleep. Home at 10 PM? You'll go to sleep at 2 AM. 11 PM? 3 AM and so on. Good luck with work. Westmere
I went to a viewing and waited awkwardly with 30 people for the real estate agent. When she finally turned up, she asked us which house she was supposed to be showing. I applied for that place, and another one in the same area. I was pretty sure we had it in the bag. Ponsonby
Both of the flats we applied for went to families. It's not enough to be a group of yo-pros (young professionals) to get a flat in Auckland. It turns out you need to have a child too, all the while schmoozing a property manager named Maureen. Newmarket
This flat had a Californian king bed, which took up the entire room but made my friend I feel like we were sleeping in separate countries. After a string of rejections, I start to panic and decide it is impossible to rent a flat in a group. I must start looking on my own. Greenlane
Greenlane was my longest residency and by far the house where I have done the most emotional growth. I visited four flats looking for a flatmate (two friends of friends, two Trade Me). It's excruciating to talk about hobbies (does anyone have any hobbies other than the internet?). You're pretending to listen to others talking about theirs ("I'm trying out veganism and it's going really great!") while trying to work out if they want you to be a super fun party gal or the flatmate that doesn't exist. You sit self-consciously on someone's couch knowing they are just trying to work out if you're a psychopath. Then there is walking out to find your next competitor on the porch, who greets you like you already live there. Greenlane (still)
The most important thing to remember is no location, flatmate or house will ever be perfect. Sometimes things might be temporary and you have to take what you can get, or maybe you strike gold. The best thing I took away from this experience is how good my friends are to me, because wow, I asked/am still asking a lot of them and are still willing(ish) to let me drain their resources. The worst was that finding a place in Auckland's overheated property market was far, far harder than I ever could have anticipated. I have since found a home through a friend of a friend (it's always who you know) but the move in date is still two weeks away. So, it looks like I'll be hot-bedding a little longer. Follow Beatrice on Twitter.