Looking for a flat in Barcelona is very challenging. You need to be very patient and aware of scams. We were looking for an apartment more than one month. This is our experience 🙂
Best places to look for an apartment are:
You can also try on Facebook groups for Expats in Barcelona but to find flat there you need some luck 🙂
We were looking for 2-3 bedroom apartment because we are living with our polish friend. Of course, we used excel file to track all links and opinions about apartment 🙂 Kamil was alone for the first month and he was checking flats by himself. After I arrived, we were still without a new place to stay and we had only one week in the temporary one. The situation was bit stressful.
People try to fool us twice. Frist situation was when we were looking for on one page (don’t remember which one now but different that I mention above) and owner sends us link yo pay online because he is abroad. Fortunately, I have two smart IT guys in my flat and they check if this link for paying is from this site or not. And it wasn’t! It was a page made to look exactly like original but it was fake to take money from us and despair. I know now, that this is a very popular way to scam people. What you need to know is to never pay anything online, always personally with confirmation of your payment or check very well to who and where you are sending money.
The second situation was on the day of my arrival. We were thinking that we have found a perfect flat. Kamil was there on Saturday, he gave them 200 euro to reserve the apartment and he has sent them all necessary documents. But agent never calls back. He was only texting „owner is checking your documents, I will call tomorrow”. But he has never called and his phone was off. On Wednesday Kamil went there and he met with the owner. And the owner was in shock because he has already signed the contract with other people. On Monday! He didn’t know that agent took 200 euro from us but he was very embarrassed. He called the agent on his private number and was very strick. So Kamil has got his money back, but we were left without the apartment and we had only 6 days to find a new one. And this is also a very common way to fool people from abroad.
What you need to know when looking for an apartment in Barcelona ( the whole apartment, not share one):
- 95% of apartments are rented by an agency. Owners don’t have time to do it by them selfs. So you always need to pay provision, usually 10% of yearly rent plus cost of „arranging contract”. This is expensive. (We were very lucky as we found apartment directly from the owner!)
- Apartments are very expensive, each month prices are going up. For 2-3 rooms apartment with furniture not in the city center, you need to pay 1000-1300 euro per month without bills. But it’s changing a lot.
- You need be fast when you like the apartment. They are expensive, but still, there is a lot of people who want to rent. So you can see on idealista or fotocasa new add, you can call there in 1 hour and it’s already taken.
- Aircondition- rare thing 🙁
- Hitting system for winter- very rare thing. Most of the apartments in old buildings don’t have one. And during winter it is really cold so you need to buy small hitter. I don’t know why they don’t have it. Of course in winter temperature is around 5-15 degrees but still, it’s quite cold 😉
- Windows- because in Barcelone there is a lot of building and sometimes they are very close to each other, the very common thing in apartments is, that some rooms are without windows. Or they have windows but open to a wall of next building. So you can’t get fresh air and some light. For me, this is impossible to live. I need sun and I need to open the window and feel the wind. So we resigned from few flats because of lack of windows.
- Most of the flats I saw were dirty and neglected. In our current flat, I have spent 3 days on cleaning it. In Barcelona, they don’t have problems with renting flats so I think they don’t care about renting them in good condition. If I will say no because it’s ugly 7 different people will say yes.
- You need to send your contract of work to the owner and you need to prove that cost for rent is not bigger than 40% of your monthly income. Owners can make castings who they like the best, who’s earing the best and who will pay on time. So they check all our contracts to be sure that our three will always have money to pay. There are some owners who want to check you with an external insurance company, to be sure, that you can pay. This is all because in Spain it’s very hard to kick somebody out of the apartment if they are not paying.
- It’s better to sign a contract for 3-5 years with the possibility to terminate it because, regarding the law, the owner can’t ask you to pay more if you have long time contract.
- Remeber you are in Spain, no one is in rush, so you can wait few days to get an answer.
We were very lucky and we found really nice, not expensive and no agency apartment in Sant Marti 🙂 We have metro 3 minutes from home and 3 big rooms plus one small for guests. It’s clean now and decorated 🙂 It’s not perfect, there is a lot of things waiting for reparation, but this is Spain 😉
I hope this few points will help you! 🙂 If you have any questions just drop a comment! 🙂