I'm in an LDR, my DP and I started talking about moving in together last year. We agreed DP's place was too small for 2 to live comfortably in, plus he's not entirely happy there for other reasons, so started looking for a new place local to him.
We could (just about) afford to buy, but DP feels the housing market is about to tank, and this isn't a good time. So we have been looking for a rental place since the summer.
Unfortunately we've not been successful in obtaining anywhere. The market is crazy in his area, on FB there are people constantly posting looking for properties to rent. We've looked in all the usual places - Rightmove, Open rent, on social media etc and applied for everything suitable. However there's a lot of competition for every place - usually at last 5 other applicants and sometimes as many as 10 or 20. We never get a reason why we've not been selected but reading between the lines I think it's been either because we're not already living together, we're not a family (a lot of places we've viewed have had other applicants with children), or we're not renting through the same agent. One place last week we got down to the final 2 we were asked how quickly we could move in. As DP can only give his notice on the 1st of the month we said 3-4 weeks as then DP would still be paying a month overlap - ie giving notice on 1 April and moving out on 1 May, but new tenancy starting late March/ early April - and we got rejected for that one, I guess because the other applicant said 'immediately'. We've had another couple of applications where the agents came back with questions like why I lived in another part of the country, whether I/we worked from home, and I think that's probably been reasons to reject us - likewise a couple of times we've asked if basic repairs (think cupboards hanging off, holes in carpets), repainting flaking or chipped paint and so on would be done, and again heard no more.
There's not really any more we can do as far as I can see. Our finances are ok, we have good credit and secure jobs, we pass the affordibility criteria. There's no obvious reason to reject us other than there's just so much demand.
The upshot of it all is DP is fed up, thinks it's completely pointless, and we need to stop looking. He said it's a waste of time, he's sick of going to viewings (this falls to him as I'm too far away) and we're never going to get anywhere if we haven't in the last 9 months so what's the point?
I see where he's coming from but equally if we stop looking we definitely won't find anything will we? He thinks we just have to make do as we are, and possibly next year the situation will change. I find that quite frustrating, and want to keep on with it, because surely at some point we will get somewhere, other people do so why not us?
So who's BU, or do we both have a point?