Apartment Trek

Today SY and I met with Seven (from the Triworks company) and went apartment hunting. What a horrible experience -- you would not believe how many scary-looking toilets there are in Shanghai.

And then there was the humidity. We looked at places here and there for hours on end in 100°(dewpoint) weather. And even though the places we looked at had air conditioners, they didn't turn them on just to show the place, leaving us to swelter in apartments made even stuffier by lack of ventilation. The only relief was the A/C in the taxis we rode going from place to place.

We're at a real disadvantage, as most landlords aren't interested in tenants for only three months. In China, both renters and landlords pay a 35%-of-the-monthly-rent fee to the agent that connects them, and landlords don't want to pay that kind of money. They'd rather wait for the next guy who'll rent for a year.

But Seven said this can be remedied by us paying the portion in addition to ours (70% of the monthly rent). We're cool with that, though with the front-loaded lease and deposit that's 4.7 months worth of money we have to cough up within a couple of days, and we're not sure if we can withdraw that much.

Some landlords we checked out just didn't make any sense. One lady had a filthy looking apartment that they hadn't cleaned up at all since the last tenent left three months ago. There was little stuff like plastic wrapper scraps laying on the floor, the chairs weren't arranged around the table, and coins laying on the counter (I'd have at least picked those up). We offered her 3000 RMB ($375) a month, but she insisted on having 3300 ($412) and wouldn't budge.

Why didn't she clean up and make the place look nice? Didn't she know she could probably charge higher rent that way? And why wouldn't she come down the 10 percent? Was it better to risk having an empty apartment for a fourth month and sacrifice 3000 in the hope of getting that extra 600 in the following two months? Weird.

Not satisfied that we found a place worth taking, we decided to check out another part of town tomorrow. Rather than look in the areas north and south of my workplace, where I've have to walk to take a bus, we decided to look at some places along the #2 subway line near Zhongshan Gongyuan (中山公园). Though I definitely don't look forward to another day's trek in this weather, I can't see any alternative available, unless it's to extend our hotel room stay another 91 days.

And that ain't happenin'.