Phil Long's blog – Teletranone

Once more I’m on the hunt for somewhere to live, having decided I want to be somewhere more interesting and also not have all of the drawbacks of house-sharing (which also means excepting I’ll lose the main benefit – saving money on rent and affording somewhere I wouldn’t normally be able to). All being well I hope to be somewhere else come September/October…

I’m looking at somewhere within easy-reach of the centre of Manchester without the effort of taxis for part of the journey. However, I also need to avoid the mistake I made when I lived in the Greenquarter – where the tightly-packed development meant that if somebody was having a late night everybody was having a late night; sounds echoed loudly around the narrow spaces between buildings. I also seemed to have people living above me who enjoyed dragging furniture around from 10pm until 8am every night. I’ll be keeping the car this time too – so I’ll need a parking space. Add to that I’ve got a house-full of furniture and appliances to populate the place with and my list of possibilities is shrinking.

My efforts are being frustrated by a couple of factors;

1. Letting agents not getting back to me – I’ve asked to view a few places and dropped enquiries through to agents on Wednesday and Thursday. I figure these places are after business, so I’m disappointed that they aren’t getting back to me.

2. Search websites are mostly crap – filtering out furnished places, or getting the right area, has been really frustrating. Rightmove are pretty good with location but, more often than not, when you select ‘Unfurnished’ it continues to return properties which are actually furnished. I’ve tried their iPad app too – which simply doesn’t have the option to filter on furnishing, or parking.

I’ve also tried Zoopla which seems accurate in terms of furnishing, but is no good at narrowing down an area and – if you use the map view – it ignores all of the filters you’ve applied and so renders that function useless.

One potential silver-lining is there’s a few places in the ‘Chips’ development which I’m interested in – with canal-side views and a mate’s girlfriend works there so is chasing up my email enquiry to them.

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