Congratulations, You’ve Just Won…
Amazing news. I have an apartment. I signed all the contracts tonight and as long as I pay the deposit (CHF 6,000) the place is mine on April 1. This may not sound like a bloggable topic, but then, I’ve never had to rent an apartment in a place where the vacancy rate was 1%, except maybe back in 1999 during the dot com boom. Even so, renting an apartment here in Zurich is nothing at all like putting your name on a waiting list for a shitty little apartment in Santa Clara. It’s more like the lottery. Being first in line may not necessarily be irrelevant here, but it certainly doesn’t count for even a fraction of the drama needed to land a place.
Apartments here have “viewings,” which are very similar to open houses except that you’re looking at a place available for rent, not for sale. During these allotted viewing times (which typically last for one hour, and occur once total) you and thirty to ninety other people will show up, with or without agents (the expats always show up with bilingual agents), to look at the place and decide on the spot if you want to “apply” for it. Applying involves picking up an application (all written in German), schmoozing with the landlord who is usually the one showing the apartment, and then either filling out the application on the spot or filling it out later and handing it in as soon as possible, then praying that your application will be seen among the other eighty-nine in the pile.
Over the past few weeks I’ve looked at about nine places and applied for four of them. The places I looked at varied in price from CHF 1800/month all the way to CHF 3500/month. The monthly rent doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with the number of applicants. In fact, one of the higher priced ones had the most people of all vying for the place, since it was in a highly desirable part of Zurich called “Seefeld,” well known as an expat haven. As it turns out, I may have a sweet deal with my company, but most expats have even sweeter deals, and they are all beautiful people who show up with their glamorous spouses and suit-clad agents in black Mercedes, and they chat up the landlords and laugh in that loud, annoying banker fashion that denotes that their jokes are superior to everyone else’s. I didn’t end up renting in Seefeld. I suppose my agent and I in our jeans, babbling on in English about horses and making fun of some of the weird apartment designs were a little too irregular to fit into Seefeld. I ended up in a suburb called Wollishofen, which is about two miles south of the office and in a cute little neighborhood with a grocery store directly across the street (important if you don’t have a car).
The landlords’ choosing of an applicant doesn’t seem to follow a whole lot of logic or reason, except that when one warms up to you it’s an ass kissing fest like you’ve never seen. When my agent found out yesterday that this landlord was possibly “interested in discussing my application,” she called him back immediately to get more information. Early this morning I received an email from her exclaiming fantastic news, the guy had decided to offer me the apartment. It was almost like finding out that you’d just beat out the other 200 offers on that rare, limited edition Bambi-shits-in-the-woods movie cell on eBay. You’re excited, but you’re not exactly sure why. It’s as if although I know it’s difficult to find an apartment out here, it’s impossible for me to get excited by what I feel is a completely contrived, biased, and nonsensical application process.
This became even more glaring to me this evening when we were supposed to meet Herr Holen-pants at my office to discuss and sign the contracts. My agent, ever the non-Swiss one, was late yet again to our meeting, a whole five minutes late stuck in traffic, and Herr Holen-pants was so pissed at this that he slammed his briefcase down on a sofa in disgust in the middle of the lobby. About 30 seconds later my agent appeared, and there was much angry talking in German before she finally calmed him down by suggesting we sign the documents at the Spanish restaurant next door.
The contract of course revealed a hitherto undisclosed fee of CHF 115/month for a parking space in front of the building, which I tried to decline. At this, Herr Holen-pants became livid again and snapped at my agent in German, and she gravely explained that if I refused to pay for the parking space he’d just give the apartment to the next person on his list who would pay for the parking space. She then explained that I had two options. Decline this apartment and continue looking for an apartment, knowing that I had less than a week to find another one before I left for South Africa for my conference, or pay for the parking space and hope that someone else would rent it from me. She would not actually give me her opinion either way about what I should do, which surprised me. I figured that after I had called her boss a week ago complaining about her lack of service she’d be happy to be rid of me. Instead, she just looked at me seriously, waiting for me to make a decision. I decided to take the place. I am, as it stands, still undecided about purchasing a car, but now I guess since I have a parking space I have one less thing to worry about if I end up going that route (and I certainly haven’t ruled it out considering how nice that’d make my commute to my various horse activities).
Herr Holen-pants is a fat, bald slum lord who lives in Lucerne and runs your standard rule infested apartment building in Zurich. Among his rules are, no grilling on either balcony, no placing anything outside your front door, clean your own damn snow off your parking space, and so forth. In reality, I don’t actually mind any of these rules, because there are many noise related rules that can only work in my favor after dealing with years of complete and utter rudeness at the hands of various apartment dwelling neighbors in the U.S. There’s an urban legend here in Zurich (that might have more truth to it than I care to find out) that you can’t flush your toilet after 10 p.m. Frankly, old and grumpy as I am, I wouldn’t mind that one bit if it were true.
February 6th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Dang, and I thought getting an apartment in NYC is tough. Still, I don’t feel bad for you - YOU ARE IN SWITZERLAND!! That’s awesome. Have fun in South Africa too.