After only eight months here, we finally found our own place to live. In Vancouver that sort of delay would be inconceivable – we’d look in the paper or Craigslist, contact landlords, look at places and sign a contract and have a place to live within a month – two at the outside. Here it doesn’t work that way. The difficulty is that there isn’t really a free market in rental housing. There is free market rental housing, but the mortgage interest write-off and high taxes make rents for these places extremely high – even a two bedroom place in a decent neighbourhood is usually outside of what would be comfortable for us on one salary plus my maternity pay. And, there’s very little direct landlord to tenant contact – most landlords go through an agent who charges the tenant up to a month’s rent for basically listing the property, signing the contract and handing over the keys. There’s no central listing of available properties. We weren’t even able to find an agent who would actually search other agency listings for us – which means that finding a place to rent means searching all the agency listings and then contacting the agent directly, and then paying them for mostly providing services for the landlord. Great system.
Buying is actually cheaper than renting however Utrecht has an extremely tight market and it’s very hard to find a good place for a reasonable price – we were looking for quite a while. I think we sort of gave up when we found a place we liked and had to bid for it against four other people – here you get one chance to bid, no auction, and you have to bid blind. We bid a little over asking, which in our realtor’s opinion was high for the place anyway, but we were overbid by €20,000. Since then, almost nothing good has come on the market anyway and we’re kind of thinking it might be better to wait until I have a job.
And then there’s social housing, getting which takes many years of waiting time, but once you get it it’s fairly cheap and good. If you’re low income you can get really cheap and good, so the best way to do it is to get on the social housing list when you first move out of your parents’, live in student housing while you’re in university and probably for a few years after that and then, while your income is still low, get into a ridiculously low-rent place in a great neighbourhood and just stay there.
Of course, that’s not what Ivo did – he did register, but a couple years into his degree, so he only had almost seven years of waiting time. After trying for numerous places for many months – you’re only allowed to react on four places every two weeks – we finally got a nice place in the area we had sworn we wouldn’t live in – Lunetten. It’s not a bad area, it’s just very suburban feeling, quiet and green, not the urban feel that we both like so much. For Vancouver folks, I think it feels like Richmond (though definitely not in cultural makeup). Of course, it’s not technically suburban since we’re still within city limits (though just), and it’s suburban in a Dutch way, which means we’re within sight of a train station that has trains that make the six minute ride to the centre every half hour, and where there’s a bus stop serving four buses, three of which are every 10 minutes during the day – the fastest is 20 minutes to the centre. Biking is faster than the bus – about 10-15 minutes, so that will be great once we get Liam in a bike seat. And there’s a shopping centre with most shops necessary for daily life less than a five minute walk away. But still, it’s not the quaint old centre which we really loved. An annotated Google Map:
And here’s a link to a Google satellite map with photos on it – the closer you get the more photos you see.
Anyway, we got the place just before we left for Canada, so the day after we got back we went and collected the keys and took a look. This is what we found.
The kitchen:
The living room:
The living room from the other side (including sleeping Liam).
The toilet – this is in the entry hall, right by the front door.
From outside the toilet door, looking up the stairs and into the living room.
Ivo’s and my bedroom:
Liam’s room:
The study/guest room:
The bathroom – no toilet up here, just a shower and a sink.
The view in the back:
The view in the front:
If you look at the pictures, you might get the sense that there’s something missing. I was surprised by how little comes with a rental property here. I knew we wouldn’t get appliances so we’d have to buy our own stove, fridge and washing machine (and we’d already bought the dishwasher off the previous tenants), but I didn’t know that we wouldn’t get light fixtures or window coverings. We were also lucky that we got flooring, and for free, and very lucky that it was actually nice laminate. The previous tenants could have taken it or asked us to buy it from them and we would have to put in our own. There are also no built in closets, which is pretty normal for Dutch housing. So we just have to paint, get lighting fixtures and curtains, get appliances (we have the loan of a camping fridge and cooktop from Ivo’s parents), get furniture for Liam’s room and the living room/dining area and get more closets. Piece of cake, really.