Moving house is one of the most stressful experiences in a person's life

I mean, it's a fairly simple process, one would think. You pack your stuff in boxes, move it to a new house, unpack your stuff in the new place, and do a spot of cleaning before you completely vacate.

Easy, right?

Then why on earth is it considered one of the most stressful experiences in a person's life? It's right up there with the death of a loved one and career/job change.

One thing I can think of that these three have in common is that they all involve life change.

With the death of a loved one, we have to try to reconfigure our lives and our relationship to what we do every day without that person's involvement. With changing career or job, we are walking away from what we know, the people we've worked alongside, the routine of going to work, working and coming home in a certain way. And with moving house, we are pulling up the roots we have laid down in a place we've called home, our safe space, our retreat, and trying to build a new sanctuary somewhere else.

Another thing these three experiences have in common is loss. Whether it is the loss of someone close, a work routine, or a home, we have to grapple with the concept of rebuilding something, plugging the hole, or learning to live around it.

For us, fear was bound up with this move. We were approved for the new house on the day that we were meant to move out - talk about cutting it fine! Homelessness was again a very real possibility.

While we wouldn't have been sleeping rough as we have family who would have taken us in, the reality of how easily a family can fall into homelessness was made starkly clear. We have employment, we have "stuff" to our name, we have vehicles, but the rental market is bonkers crazy and none of those things could safeguard a roof over our heads.

We were seeing the same people at inspection after inspection as we looked for a home.

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All of them on a deadline, most of them with children, and they all held a sense of desperation about them, trying to build rapport with the property manager, trying to visualise their lives and their "stuff" in the rooms ... It was like looking in a mirror and seeing our own situation multiplied seemingly exponentially.

I know that I've written about the rental market, housing vacancy rates and inflation stresses recently, but when a family of six that you are close friends with has been looking for a home for four years without success, the lived experience of navigating the rental market and facing homelessness becomes so much more than numbers on a page.

Your pets become a liability when the rental market is like this, and you find that having a pet can make the risk of your potential tenancy seem greater than applicants without a furry family member. It's no longer about the joy and comfort they bring, the love they share, or the responsibility they teach to the little ones; it's about where they poop, whether they dig and if they bark. They, too, are reduced to a very basic formula of risk assessment and as a result, while technically, in some states renters cannot be denied a pet, the presence of a pet on a lease application can lead to landlords leaning towards pet-less applicants.

It can feel a lot like your freedom is controlled when you are a renter.

Along with the issue of pets, you can't hang pictures where you like, your housekeeping is inspected regularly and judged, and there is zero security from year to year that you will even have the house you are making your home.

And purchasing a home is becoming harder so this is an option unavailable to many.

Thus, the rental market being so competitive for renters creates more problems than just demand.

The power of choice that landlords are currently enjoying means renters need to be as close to ideal applicants as possible, and this often means sacrifice.