Battle for rentals at Mount heats up | Bay of Plenty News | Local News in Bay of Plenty

You've got to have some serious stickability if you want to find your dream house at the Mount over summer.

Or a big slice of luck.

As the temperatures begin to rise, so too does the demand for rental housing.

The rental market has become a hotly contested battlefield in recent weeks, with a glut of house seekers fighting it out for too few rental properties.

BeHome Realty property manager Josh Fitzgibbon said summer could be the most difficult time of the year for potential renters.

"You tend to find a lot of people in the summer time, they're looking to sell. So then you get a whole shift in the tenant focus. The supply doesn't tend to increase but the demand does."

And house hunters need to be more pro-active to beat the competition.

"I've had a listing go up on Trade Me and, honestly, within one minute and 15 seconds I had a call," Mr Fitzgibbon said.

Another property was listed and let within 24 hours, he said, and many of his properties were seeing as many as 100 views a day from hopeful hunters on the internet auction site.

The average length of tenancies at the Mount has also been increasing, another factor working against flat hunters.

"We are finding the length of tenancy is stretching out to between 22 and 24 months. That's probably doubled in the last five years," he said.

House hunter Monique Kloppenburg said the market was difficult and felt for those who needed a house in a hurry.

"We have just moved but it took months of searching to find something and with anything decent, if you hadn't rung within an hour of it being on Trade Me, [you] have missed out.

"We would check Trade Me hourly to try and catch any new properties so it's def not easy we were lucky we had no deadline I feel sorry for those that have a deadline to when they must be out it must make it so stressful [sic]," she said on the Bay of Plenty Times Facebook page.

Mary Dods, property manager for Realty Focus in downtown Mount Maunganui, said there had been a marked increase in people applying for rentals, corresponding with a downturn in available properties.

"A lot of our viewings we are getting like four or five people instead of one or two [like it had been earlier in the year]. And maybe three of those will apply.

"We've just had an incredible response [but] we've had a shortage, the ones for rent," she said.

To make matters worse, many home owners returned to Mount Maunganui to use their winter rentals as summer holiday homes, Harcourts property manager Margie Hampshire said.

The summer period was always hectic, but she pointed out that this year things seemed particularly bad. Knowing she would be hounded for certain desirable properties, she said it was sometimes easier to let select people know about them rather than advertise.

"To save my own sanity ... I haven't even put it on the net. It becomes unbearable if I put it on the net," she said.

Anne Lapwood, from LJ Hooker Papamoa, said the battle for good rental properties extended along the coast.

"There's a big shortage of properties, anywhere along the beach line. We have a lot of people ringing and by the time they ring the properties are gone."