Life in a hostel environment

'ROOM for rent: bunk bed, share with 250 housemates, must tolerate mess, snoring, drunks and the smell of budget travellers."

You won't find this one up on the rental board at your local bookshop. If you did, you might deride it as a bogus prank, a joke ad for the desperate. Backpacker hostels offer basic accommodation for travellers, but for some inner-city house hunters, the hostel life offers a better option than the ordeal of enduring the home rental blues.

Andrew (surname withheld by request), 35, of North Fitzroy, has found the rigmarole of looking for an inner-city share house to be a game of cutthroat frustration.

"I'm not a student, not a woman, not a vegetarian. Once you whittle it down past that, down to your area, your price range, to the places that are still available and suitable, the odds of finding the right place just get smaller and smaller."

Andrew recently racked up his 450th consecutive night in a shared dormitory bunk bed.