Stacey Fletcher looks at some of the good and bad of flatting in Dunedin's student quarter.
Student flatting in Dunedin is arguably the best in the country. Everyone lives within walking distance of each other, especially in second year, where you are likely to find yourself knowing every single person on your street if you move to Castle. On top of this, the prices are quite reasonable, given that when you go to Wellington or Auckland you find people are paying far more than what we do here for flats of the same or lesser quality.
In saying this, though, the flats in Dunedin are run like any other business, and are at the end of the day someone's money-maker. There are flats which by any normal standards are borderline uninhabitable, but will be filled because of their location.
In my second year I lived in a brand new house on Castle St, behind another flat owned by the same landlord. Those in the house in front of me were paying a rate just under what we were, and there were seven rooms in the house. Ours had four, which meant the landlord was making almost double from the house in front, which was incredibly old, cold and almost impossible to make look clean.
However, this is the norm down here, and it is what we are all used to. Nobody really questions it because down in Dunedin you don't find a flat by going online and looking at advertised rentals, rather you flat-hunt (as you know every house in the immediate North Dunedin vicinity is likely to be a student flat) and then move into a well-known area - or even a well-known flat - you discovered and signed in June the previous year.
It all seems normal until I compared this with my parents' housing situation in Melbourne. For a while we were renting a 6-bedroom house (decent size bedrooms, too, not just ones that have been added on wherever a tiny space was found), with a pool, four bathrooms and three living rooms, in a nice suburb 10 minutes out of the city. It cost just under what those boys in front of me were paying for a scruffy student flat on a street with more scruffy student flats.
Another strange thing about flatting in Dunedin is the 12-month lease. Around June every year, students who have decided to move are getting together groups and flat-hunting to lock down their home for the year after. You have normally signed and laid down your bond by around mid-August at the latest. Then, over summer, you continue to pay for your current flat until the end of December, then immediately start making rent payments for next year's home.
In these summer months, landlords have the opportunity to complete maintenance on the flats, as they know most students are away from November to February. In this time, painting or carpeting may be done; meanwhile rent is being paid by absent tenants.
In theory, whenever a house is uninhabitable, a tenant should not be liable to pay rent. So if a landlord is using the summer months for repairs from the last year, or general improvements for the next year, rent shouldn't really be being paid, as the house should be able to be lived in whenever you are paying rent.
These are all things that even though they're a bit different compared with usual renting situations, are accepted as the price you pay for the convenience of having a flat sorted for the next year. For me, the landlords I have had have always been extremely helpful and easy-going, so it makes the extra expense and preparation worth it, even though it's not necessarily how things are done elsewhere.
