Inquiries through major online real estate search engines are still driving most of the movement in Wagga's rental market as agencies seek pre-approvals to manage high demand.
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Raine & Horne client services officer Lucinda Unwin said the agency had been seeking pre-approvals since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in March.
"That's when we started to see the decline in rental properties coming up, and that's when people started looking as well which didn't help," she said.
"We normally ask everyone to send through their documents to support their application ... then we can take them through (a property) and if they're happy with it we've already got their application, which gives them that step forward."
Ms Unwin said this allowed potential renters to put in one application that could be transferred to the next property that came up.
She said while this sped up the process, it did not necessarily put renters making their first online inquiry at a disadvantage.
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Hore and Davies director John Bittar said online inquiries were still the "preferred option" and the most popular, but all types of inquiries were welcome.
"90 per cent of inquiries do come from online views and they're sent through to our leasing consultants," he said.
Mr Bittar said the company would also often share rental properties on social media when they come on the market.
He said the Wagga rental market was likely to only get busier over the summer, and it was important to make sure nothing was missing in a first application so agencies were not "waiting on snippets of information" while other applicants were ready to go.
I think the main thing is if you see something that's in your price range, email, ring, whatever it might be, contact the agency and try and organise an inspection as soon as possible to get through," he said.
Remax Elite director Dave Skow said his company was still seeing incomplete applications, and those were the renters who were missing out.
"We're seeing at the moment the tenants that are probably otherwise good that are missing out may be the ones that aren't as well prepared with applications and accessibility of references," he said.
Mr Skow said while the company was always willing to work with a good tenant to find them a property, online searching was still "the best way" for a well-prepared tenant to find a home and there would likely still be opportunities to compete with applicants who were already talking to an agency.
"A lot of landlords will want to make sure they still have some choice in tenant, a lot of the time landlords will still want us to advertise a property to lease to the open market to give everyone fair chance to apply," he said.