There are a multitude of avenues you can go down in order to find a flat, flat share, house or house share. The flat I’m currently living in was found through an estate agent: a real estate agent tasked with finding a suitable tenant for a privately owned unit. The information below provides you with some of the bigger estate agents in London plus other links to help you research your new home. Have a look at these sites to see what is currently on the market within your price range and desired location (if you have no idea about location, consider where you will be working, going to school or where any friends live, as well as how close to a tube, train or major bus line the flat is. If you will be a student in central London, but can’t afford the area, follow the tube lines outwards into the outer zones.)

CLASSIFIEDS

If you are a student or single person looking for just a room, a sublet, a bedsit or if you want to keep costs to the very minimum and don’t want to bother with an agent, have a look through the classifieds on Gumtree. Gumtree operates the same way as Craigslist (people here don’t use Craigslist much). I’ve worked with two twenty-something English guys who, when looking for a room to let, relied on Gumtree to find a place. You often find the listing is a person looking for a new flatmate or is leaving the country and wants to sublet their flat for six months. You will also find agency postings.

Just remember, as with Craigslist, you don’t want to send anyone any money if there is anything at all unusual or suspicious about the dealing. I read something about a person who went to see a flat, paid the deposit by bank transfer and when she went to get the keys, someone else was there who also paid a deposit and was there for the keys. Be completely aware and cautious.

RESEARCH THROUGH ESTATE AGENTS

(Quick facts: **Flat = apartment; there is nothing different about the layout of a unit that makes it a flat vs. apartment. **Estate agents operate more or less the same way here as real estate agents do in the US. **More than one estate agent could represent the same property and this happens a lot. **You don’t pay the agent anything until they’ve found you a flat, helped you negotiate the costs and you sign the lease)

• Foxton’s We worked with a lovely agent from the Fulham Broadway Foxton’s office as well as a less lovely agent from the Shoreditch Foxton’s office. Your experience with any agent is going to vary, so I cannot recommend one office as being any better than another. Foxton’s is one of the more expensive agents (they charge you a fee after they’ve found you a place and you sign the lease–approx 300 pounds from what I remember). They have a shiny refreshments bar in their lobbies, company-branded Mini Coopers that they drive you around in to see properties and a shiny catalogue of properties with top-notch photography. While this full-service is impressive and comforting, this is where your high fees go so think carefully about where you want to put your budget. (Also, a couple I know is moving out of their Foxton’s-found flat and are having difficulties getting their deposit back. Just a reminder that if you have any questions during the rental process, get them answered, preferably in writing.)
• Chard Chard is quite similar to Foxton’s although I haven’t worked with them so I am unsure about their standard fee structure. I also don’t think they have the same fancy offices. They also drive people around in Priuses, not Minis.
• There are a ton of other estate agents throughout London and the surrounding areas. They are often specific to an area or borough (neighbourhood). There are a few comprehensive sites that list a lot of the properties available from several agents: Findaproperty.com, Rightmove.com and Primelocation.com. I was all over these two sites late last year when we were looking for a flat so these are good for research and price comparison. Remember, multiple agents may be representing the same property so you will notice the same flat listed multiple times but by different agents. Check how the price per week varies between them. Even though there are different agents jockeying for you to buy/lease through them, there is only one owner making the decision on how much they will let it go for. This leads into the next important tip: negotiating.

NEGOTIATING YOUR LEASE

You will want to try to negotiate for a lower monthly rent (or weekly rent, as it is typically advertised). There isn’t a standard 10% or 20% rule  that I know of, but we definitely negotiated the rent on our current place, to close to 200-pounds less per month than the asking price. If anything, this tells me that all agents will mark up the cost of a place, to earn extra cash if you don’t negotiate or if you do, they will look as though  they are doing you a favour. Clearly, I’m not a fan of the negotiating game and I don’t enjoy playing it. Alas, it’s part of every culture in the world.

If you find a place you love, a nice building in a neighbourhood you like, look for ways to negotiate to get it for less. It could be that it lacks an updated washing machine and you’d like the owner to replace it before you move in, or you will take accept a reduction in rent. It could be that there is a similar place even closer to the tube station going for less. There will always be something you could negotiate on and you can almost always, ALWAYS, be sure that the advertised price isn’t the true value.

WHAT I DID

FLAT 1

When we first moved to London, we moved into a serviced apartment, paid for by my husband’s company. (There are companies that buy units in buildings and let them out on short and long-term leases). We had a few options on neighbourhoods and selected the heart of Westminster (very central London) based on the recommendation of the letting company. Having lived in two other flats since then, as well as see the other types of flats our colleagues lived in, this first flat was utter luxury. New appliances, modern heating, quality windows, heated towel racks and flooring…and to think we weren’t blown away by having all of this in London (we come from California, where everything is new as a standard, not an extra!). We would soon learn to appreciate it. Also, even though this flat was very central, it was very close to Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, etc and there were just too many people at all times. It also lacked a neighbourhood feel and the charming London look all foreigners to this city are looking for.

FLAT 2

After my husband switched from being employed by the US office to employed by the UK office, our days of free rent were over. We had to find our own place to live. We had no real idea where to begin and there was a person at my husband’s office who was letting out a flat she no longer lived in. It was in South Kensington, still very central and had much more of a West London feel to it.  The old building and period details were very appealing as well as the fact we wouldn’t have to go through the standard rental procedures since we were dealing with a person we knew, not a stranger. We moved in after a tiny bit of friendly negotiating with my husband’s colleague and signed a contract, just as we would have if we didn’t happen to know the landlady.

Overall, we enjoyed living there but we were presented with new realities of living in London, such as mice. Mice are very common in London homes, flat, office buildings–in London in general. At least they aren’t rats. Anyway, the realities were mice, an old dishwasher and washing machine that didn’t work very well, low water pressure and a small water heater that ran out of hot water after a five minute shower (not fun for two people) and draughty windows. After about a year, the water pump began to leak into the flat below us and the owner decided she wanted this place off of her hands. Off we went again, looking for a new place to live.

FLAT 3 (and the last flat, if we’re lucky)

This time, with no personal connections to anyone letting out a flat, we went the estate agent route. By this time, we were much more familiar with areas in London and we didn’t like South Ken so much afterall. We started our search in North London (Camden, Belsize Park and Hampstead areas) by looking at available properties list on Findaproperty.com, as well as contacting estate agents based in those areas. We made several appointments to see flats, increased our budget when we didn’t see anything we liked, then still didn’t see anything we liked. Yes, we could have been less picky but we had already moved twice and wanted to get settled here. We also knew what we wanted: modern amenities but an energetic neighbourhood of people who lived and worked there. When North London didn’t do it for us, we spread our search out to East London, which used to be a certain “way” which “they” say is changing. (Personally, I still wasn’t willing to move to certain areas in East London, especially if it meant walking alone at night after work. This was when we worked with the Shorditch Foxton’s agent who was really pushy about getting us into a flat, or tried to show us ones that were well out of our budget which only wasted our  time.)

Even if we saw a place we liked, the public transit was indirect and would be a daily headache. We also looked in the South west area of London (Fulham, Putney, Wimbledon) though these are mainly only accessible by the District line, which is known for being unreliable. I would have liked to live in those areas, though, particularly Putney Green, which I liked a lot. We looked further east towards Greenwich and Blackheath, again both are lovely but just a tad too far out from the centre of town. They also start to feel more like “villages” and that was a little too quiet for us. We would often visit an area were were interested in and head straight for an estate agent office. They post flyers in their windows of their current properties. If we liked the look of a place, we would go in and ask if it was possible to have a look at it right then.

In the end, we settled on the area of Canary Wharf, which was a surprise because I categorically ruled it out at the beginning of our search (we stayed in Canary Wharf once during a business trip to London and I found it to be so boring and dire). But we’re in a much more interesting area of Canary Wharf which is actually really pretty, the location worked out well for my husband’s businesses and it’s easy to get into Zone 1 (we’re in Zone 2). Our flat itself is an old renovated warehouse so we have modern amenities plus a bit of historical detail.

The negotiation process was an a bit of an ordeal since the agent wasn’t the best, but we did manage to get them to replace the carpets and accept less than the asking price.

If you’d like to read more about different areas in London, there is a great book we referred to whenever we were making a big move called London For Londoners. It gives descriptions for the different boroughs as well as statisticss regarding demographic, schools, history, etc.