Hello all, I didn't expect that many helpful answers. We finally found the furnished apartment that will suit our situation best in PN. Some of the suggestions also gave us idea of searching for vacation homes and we found a nice home near Rotorua for our stopover from Auckland-Hamilton-Rotorua-Hamilton-Palmerston North, so thank you all for your time!
Now we are facing another question, we liked the house we found just by googling...there's no agent involved, the owner seems very accommodating also. However, they request a deposit of $1000+ (for a 5~6 months rental) into their personal account, I am sure they are lovely people, but we just don't feel that comfortable doing it without a contract just in case things don't go perfectly well as planned, with an agent, we can deposit the money into an escrow account, in this case, what can we do to protect ourselves, writing a contract via email? Just curious about what the common practice is in New Zealand for a situation like this...what I would like to do is to set a reasonable cancellation date for a full refund, since we do have our plans still pending, and also list a few things that we want them to do before we get there, moving the beds for the babies, etc.
Thanks in advance for any tips!