The price of desperation

The building above is 24 Melrose Street in Mosman, New South Wales. Melrose Street is an idyllic, quiet path in one of the most sought-after suburbs in Sydney. A Mosman address indicates a certain level of affluence and achievement. Tell a Sydneysider you live in Mosman and the response is always, “ooh, Mosman! Beautiful up there.”

The building behind the trees above is at 391 Military Road, Cremorne, New South Wales. Cremorne is a perfectly OK suburb. It is definitely not “ooh, Cremorne” worthy. It’s more, “hm, yeah, Cremorne, that’s North Shore, hey?”

Military Road is the thoroughfare that connects Cremorne and Mosman to the rest of Sydney. It’s a six-lane, 24x7 behemoth of a main artery, easily the busiest road on Sydney’s Lower North Shore. It is a constant chorus of cars, trucks, buses, horns, motorcycles, hoons in Mitsubishis with fart-can exhausts, and emergency vehicles.

When I was frantically searching for a place to live in Sydney last March, I would have breezed right by “391 Military Road, Cremorne” on Domain or Realestate.com.au. Who wants to live on Military Road? It’s loud.

When I saw “24 Melrose Street, Mosman,” I did a little inner cheer to discover that a unit in Mosman actually was in my price range. I stopped scrolling and clicked the little star on the Domain app to “shortlist” it.

An important thing to know about the Sydney real estate market: When you need an apartment, especially if you need an apartment on relatively short notice, you don’t get the apartment you want. You get the apartment you can get.

Rents are very high and supply is very tight. In my price range, I was never competing with fewer than five people for any unit, and the typical number was more like 30. I attended more than 40 apartment inspections. Nothing tells you more about a studio apartment than when 24 people try to fit into it. Real estate agents quietly encourage bidding wars: “I know we advertised this at $590, but … well, I can’t TELL you to put $650 on the application; I’m just saying it’ll help.”

Oh, I should note those dollar figures above are not “per month.” In Australia, rents are expressed in “per week.”

The Australian dollar is worth about 65 cents U.S., but that doesn’t really take the sting out of the fact that I’m paying more for rent on a small apartment than I am paying on the 15-year mortgage for my home in South Carolina.

Anyway, I was getting fairly desperate when I applied for the unit at 24 Melrose Street in Mosman. I did visit for an inspection, and it was one of the more lightly attended inspections; only 10 or so people lined up outside early afternoon on a Tuesday. I walked through, asked if all the furniture I could see was included (it was), and immediately submitted an application. I had been rejected four times up to this point because I hadn’t submitted the application quickly enough or had refused to participate in a bidding war, and I was running out of company-paid hotel days.

I told my Sydney-raised co-worker about the unit. He looked at a map. “Oh, look at that, right on Military Road. That’ll be loud, mate.”

At that point, I was so happy to have an address that I kind of dismissed the reaction.

As it turned out, my new address wasn’t really my address.

I found this out when I was setting up utilities. The very helpful person on the other end of the phone at Red Energy couldn’t find 24 Melrose Street in Mosman. Neither could his supervisor. I came thisclose to paying the utilities for the lucky resident at 22 Melrose Street, so convinced Red Energy was that I was wrong about my address. And I was new to the country, so, what did I know? Maybe they were right. But I kept saying, “Well, on my lease, it says ‘24 Melrose Street.’ ”

Finally they said, “Well, give us your NMI and we’ll see if we can use that.” I did a quick web search to determine that “NMI” stands for “National Meter Identifier.” I couldn’t find it. The real-estate agent couldn’t find it.

Two days later, the head of the strata (think “condominium” in US terms) finally provided me with the elusive NMI. I called Red Energy back and read off the string of letters and numbers that would soon turn into my electric bill.

“Ah, there you are,” the cheerful bloke said into his headset. “391 Military Road in Cremorne.” But … but … my lease says “24 Melrose Str….”

That was when I knew that I’d been had. I had succumbed to the power of Marketing. It would be a little strong to say I was hoodwinked, but … I was kinda hoodwinked.

Given enough time, you can adjust to anything, and I had a year to do so. At best, I could convince myself that the cars going by sounded like ocean waves, kind of like how Tom Petty described it in “American Girl.” But just as I was about to delude myself into seaside serenity, that’s usually when the Harley or the fleet of sportbikes would go by. BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP. And it happened that my window (always open, because no air conditioning) was exactly at the point where somebody would hit the throttle to try to make the light at Belmont Road. So I heard BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAP a lot.

Then there were the emergency vehicles. Ambulances at all hours of the day and night, and at least one high-speed police pursuit whizzed by my window. It was super-fun when an ambulance would get stuck in early morning traffic while I was on an early morning call, because it seemed like they would always get stuck waiting for that traffic light at Belmont Road.

So, that’s been the last year of my life. And it’s OK, because literally everything else about living in Sydney has been some level of great. I needed something to complain about, I guess.

I’ll still need something to fuel my daily whinge, but I’ll no longer have “traffic noise outside my window.” I have spent this weekend moving my meager belongings from my fake Mosman address and have settled into a new flat in the Inner West suburb of Balmain, where I will spend my last few months as a Sydneysider.

The only sounds I hear as I write this are the sounds of weird Australian birds and the occasional conversations of people taking their Sunday morning walks as summer comes to a close in the Southern Hemisphere. I am reveling in the relative silence.