Our Avondale Blockhouse Bay Road property was on a 12-month fixed term rental agreement ending December 2007. Into the 13th month of the tenancy, Latu - our first long-term tenant - gave notice to move out. They have BOUGHT A HOUSE and him and his family are moving into their own home! We congratulate him sincerely as this is a huge event in anyone’s life - and not an easy step with the high house prices in Auckland.

This left us looking for a tenant. Quite difficult really when you’re on the other side of the world. Fortunately several things were on our side:

1. We have *AWESOME* property managers - Greg and Helen who have been looking after Blockhouse Bay Rd for us. Thanks guys!

2. It’s summer in New Zealand - the BEST time to be putting a property up for rent (or be selling a house). Especially at the beginning of the year. People have time, days are long and everybody is generally in a good mood because of the sun!

3. The unit is actually a very nice unit. Even though it’s quite small it’s newly renovated and is tidy and very cosy.

4. The unit is great value. Everybody that looks at it always tells us that it’s a fantastic unit in comparison to similar ones in the area. This is always great to hear as we have put quite a bit of blood and sweat into it!

In line with my thoughts on the state of the rental market in Auckland a few months back we raised the rent by just over 6%. I also did some research on Trademe to make sure that the new rent was similar but also competitive for similar properties in the area.

So, as usual, up went the ad on Trademe:

The response was unbelievable:

In a single day there were over 1000!! hits and Greg had over 30 people come through to have a look during the open-home. It seems like there is some serious shortage of good-value rental properties in the Auckland area and we were wondering whether we have put the rent to low.. I wonder how one could deal with this next time. Considering we have listed the asking rent on the ad I don’t see how we can raise it once people start responding to it..

The property was rented out the following day (TTR = 1 day) for another 12-month term breaking our previous TTR (Time To Rent) record of 4 days. This one’s going to be hard to beat!

While hacking together some new php and javascript stuff (implementing a Blog Ajax TODO list which I will post about soon) I noticed that my “comments” functionality was not working due to one of my Wordpress plugins - Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin having stopped working. I believe this was a result of my layout update. I haven’t looked into it properly yet due to lack of time but have temporarily disabled the plugin while I figure out what’s wrong (maybe I should just install the latest version).

I’m curious to see how quickly (and whether at all) the bots pick up on my slack security and start posting links to all those *evil* sites