Finding a place to live in Stockholm is no joke. We
were warned about it before we came and all the advice most people in Stockholm can offer is
“its really hard”. The reality of the game set in pretty quick as we started
our own adventure.
Ironically, the problem seems to
stem from Sweden ’s
egalitarian society which at the end of World War II was transformed from a
largely agrarian society into a model representing the ‘middle way’ between
capitalism and socialism relying heavily on a social welfare system in which
equality was its cornerstone. Home ownership was and is encouraged with heavy
tax breaks for people paying mortgages and low interest rates (compared to New
Zealand at least) making ownership an attractive proposition, apart from the
very high cost that is. However one of the biggest drivers for home ownership
would have to be the dismal rental market. We have heard of people giving up on
finding somewhere to rent and buying instead!
There are basically disincentives
to be a landlord in Sweden .
The return on the investment is simply not worth it or negative. There are
government schemes to rent, which to be honest I still don’t really understand,
but basically babies are put on this list when they are born, the waiting list
is so long. So when you get a rental directly from the landlord (termed 1st
hand rental - more often than not the landlord is the state) you never let it
go. A big advantage to hanging on to the apartment is that the state often
sells the apartments with time and if you have been renting it out for a long
period, you usually get it very cheap. So when you want to leave, you don’t
relinquish the lease (that would be deemed idiotic), you simply sub let it out
(termed 2nd hand rental). Believe it or not there are even 3rd hand
rentals where you lease from the leaser of the leaser of the landlord.
Confused?
Of course everyone adds on a bit
of fat to line their pockets, leaser terms become more and more restricted and
cumbersome (and often not legal) the further down the chain you become, and you
end up with a property market like Stockholm’s where it is nearly impossible to
lease directly from the owner of an apartment or house, and 2nd and
3rd hand leasing terms are generally overpriced and short term –
1,2,3 month leases are not uncommon.
Unbelievably, we turned down a 1st
hand lease that was made available to us through a friends sisters neighbour
before we even set foot in Sweden (I hear everyone in Sweden gasp and call us
fools), but it was simply beyond our means. To put it simply, the rental
market in Sweden
is horrendously hard to crack. A recent Property Federation (Fastighetsägarna)
study in Stockholm study had this to say about it:
“The study compares how long it takes to find and sign a contract
for a small (40 square meters) rental apartment in eight European capitals.
In six of the cities in the study –Oslo , Copenhagen , Helsinki , Brussels , Madrid and Berlin Amsterdam Stockholm
In six of the cities in the study –
So how is our property search
going? Blocket (http://www.blocket.se)
is the Trade Me or EBay of Sweden and is generally
the first port of call. Apartments and houses are listed, you send a little
message to the lister and if you are very lucky they will get back to you.
Rumour has it that people listing adverts or available apartments get literally
100s of calls / emails within the first hour and I have heard that if you do
not make contact within the first couple of minutes of an advertisement been
posted, you may as well forget it. The other option is to list yourself, tag a
cheesy photo and hope people will come to you first. So for approximately $120
NZ up our advertisement went:
Our small family
(Tim, Tina and young daughter Ana) have recently moved to Stockholm
from New Zealand
We have
transferred to Sweden
We are excited to
be Stockholm and seek an apartment or house with
a minimum of 2.5 rooms to live for at least six months somewhere in the north
of Stockholm
We don’t mind if
the apartment or house is furnished or unfurnished and are willing to pay up to
12 000 SEK a month.
We are non smokers
and have no pets. We have never been in any financial difficulty and are
dependable people who are quiet and clean and would look after your apartment /
house as if it were our own. We own a house in New Zealand
Please contact me
by phone or email if you would like to hear more about us, or you have a
property that you think would be suitable for us.
Thank you for your
time in reading our advertisement and we hope to hear from you soon.
Tim and Tina
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| Our Blocket Photo - how could you resist! |
We were very lucky to get an almost
immediate reply from a lovely lady who worked as a chef on an oil rig (and
happened to be 4 months pregnant) and her husband who was a sergeant major in
the British Army currently deployed in Afghanistan . They had the perfect
apartment for us and if we deposited 3 months rent into a secure bank account,
the key would be delivered to us and we would have a 10 day appraisal of the
property in which we could decide whether we wanted it or not. Needless to say
I stopped communications at that point. We were offered a 1 month lease on the
opposite side of town, a two month lease in a 1 roomed 35 m2
apartment, a 3 month lease that may be extended from a lady with two daughters
who was moving in with her boyfriend who also had two daughters that could
extend into something more long term (if they didn’t hate each other after the
first few weeks!) and in the mean time we were sending dozens and dozens of
emails to 1st and 2nd hand lease holders of apartments
being listed for 2nd and 3rd hand rentals and hearing
back from barely any of them. And that was just on Blocket!
As the week went by we sent
messages to many people advertising apartments and houses and heard back from
barely none of them… apart from those mentioned before. We got quite a few
messages from our personal advertisement, but nearly all had apartments or
houses with very long commutes, tiny boxes where you couldn’t swing a cat,
minuscule lease periods, were over priced and/or in areas that have recently
made the International media for the wrong reasons – the Stockholm riots. I came home from work one
day and announced that I had had enough and we were going home!
Then Thursday rolled around and I
had a nice email from a lady called Eva who had an apartment in Solna, which
happens to be the suburb where I am working. We exchanged a few emails and
photos and then she sent me the address. The address looked strangely familiar.
I copied it into google earth, dragged the little man across to look at the
view of the street and laughed out loud. From behind my computer, I stretched
to the right and there, outside the window, across the road, was the very same
apartment block that my computer screen was showing. In the whole of Stockholm , we were going
to look at an apartment directly opposite my office!
So off we went. The apartment was
big – 110 m2, and at the very top (maybe a bit over) our price
range. Eva and Bo (the 1st hand lease holders) were very nice and
the apartment which they had lived in for the past 35 years and had been an embassy
for some obscure country before that, seemed like a good catch, even though the
décor was not really to our taste. Eva and Bo owned a holiday house on and
island near Stockholm and were planning on
buying a house in Spain and
living there over the Swedish winters, yet still rented the apartment and
wanted to continue to rent it (1st hand lease holders), such is the
peculiarities of the Stockholm
property market. We spent an hour there before leaving, in which time the
apartment was offered to us for 12 months. To get a nice apartment with a 12
month lease with no massive sum of money for a bond from people we trusted within
7 days of looking and 14 days of arriving in Stockholm is pretty unheard of. Locals would
beat us on the head with the folly of what we did next. We said we would sleep
on it. Later that night, Eva sent us an email dropping the rent and asking us
to have it… yes this is Stockholm ,
but it does happen!
Move in 1st of July,
and that is our Stockholm
great house hunt story.
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| Unlikely to be too many complaints about the commute length. |
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