As I mentioned earlier, I moved last week while Ruth was visiting. She (lucky her!) "got" to help me move and assemble IKEA furniture and do all sorts of exciting things like this. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.
Finding a new flat in Switzerland is not for the faint of heart. In comparison, finding a WG, or shared flat, is super-easy! Like many things, including laundry and visas and banking and recycling, it just seems much more complicated than it should be.
I learned back in September that we would need to move out of our flat, since the person officially renting it was moving out, and I didn't really want to sign on to take over the flat. I decided I was over communal living (at least for the time being), and that I wanted to find my own place.
The following is my assessment of the process.
Step 1. Put together an application packet. This packet included:
a) a copy of your work contract, stating your salary and terms of employment
b) a copy of your work permit, proving that you have the right to work in Switzerland
c) a letter of recommendation from your employer, stating that you are a good employee and that you would make a good tennant
d) a statement obtained from your local government office (for 20 CHF!) stating that you have no debts or outstanding taxes since the Swiss government started keeping tabs on you
e) a rental resume, complete with all of your personal and work information, information about previous landlords, a little paragraph about yourself in English and German, and a picture
Step 2. Compulsively haunt a set of 5 or 6 websites where flats are posted to find potential flats. Many are listed for less than 24 hours on the bigger websites, because they get such a large response.
Step 3. Spend a lot of time on Google Translate and Google Maps Street View trying to figure out if there's some sort of strange condition in the listing (eg. must be willing to commit to 4 years, or must speak German, etc.) and if "centrally located" really means immediately adjacent to the train yard.
Step 4. Contact the agencies with flats that you're interested in. Many times this could be by email, so you have to work on writing a notice in German that made sense. Sometimes you have to call, which, for me, was usually an unmitigated disaster in which I got stage fright and would speak some disastrous mixture of high German, Swiss German, and English. Not pretty.
Step 5. Get tons of emails from agencies with the open house times. Get confused about which place is which, because you've literally sent messages of interest for over 20 flats. Realize that this a full-time job.
Step 6. Plan out an open house visiting timeline so as to hit all of the places you are interested in, even if they are in different parts of the city at the same time.
Step 7. Attend said open houses. Must be there at least 10 minutes early so that you're at the front of the line and can have the first chance. Usually there are at least 10 other people at the same time. The largest was an open house that lasted two hours, but I was given a 15-minute visit slot, along with 10 other people. This meant that there was 80 different people looking at this flat!
Step 8. Fill out application from the agency, and submit it, along with the packet put together in step #1.
Step 9. Wait. If you make the first agency cut (aka. if your salary is high enough), the agency will call all of your references.
Step 10. Hear something. Or not.
Step 11. Repeat steps 2-10 until you are successful.
In the end, I ended up being quite lucky. I mentioned to my officemates that I was looking for a flat after a few days of the above procedure, and one of them had happened to have just gotten an email through some colleagues who knew someone who was looking for someone for her 1.5 room flat in Schwamendingen. My officemate forwarded me the email, and I immediately contacted the person and had an appointment to see the flat the next day. It ended up being exactly what I wanted in the neighborhood that I wanted, so I applied for it that day, right before I went on a two-week vacation with my parents.
The day I left for vacation, I got a call from the landlady of the flat, who had gotten my application. She was willing to wait to make a decision until she could meet when I got back from vacation. (Thanks to my post-doc salary, I look like an attractive renter, especially for such a small flat.)
Accordingly, the day I got back from vacation, I met the landlady, saw the apartment again, and she informed me that I got it! Of course, this was all in German. Luckily, I had brought my colleague Laura with me, just in case I we didn't understand each other. I actually didn't understand when she told me I had the apartment, so Laura had to tell me after that I really had gotten it!
(I'd like to point out that this is the second time that I've found a flat a few hours after landing in Zürich. Apparently I make a better impression right after flying?)
A few days later I paid a massive deposit and signed the contract!
And that is how I found my own flat in Zürich.
Finding a new flat in Switzerland is not for the faint of heart. In comparison, finding a WG, or shared flat, is super-easy! Like many things, including laundry and visas and banking and recycling, it just seems much more complicated than it should be.
I learned back in September that we would need to move out of our flat, since the person officially renting it was moving out, and I didn't really want to sign on to take over the flat. I decided I was over communal living (at least for the time being), and that I wanted to find my own place.
The following is my assessment of the process.
Step 1. Put together an application packet. This packet included:
a) a copy of your work contract, stating your salary and terms of employment
b) a copy of your work permit, proving that you have the right to work in Switzerland
c) a letter of recommendation from your employer, stating that you are a good employee and that you would make a good tennant
d) a statement obtained from your local government office (for 20 CHF!) stating that you have no debts or outstanding taxes since the Swiss government started keeping tabs on you
e) a rental resume, complete with all of your personal and work information, information about previous landlords, a little paragraph about yourself in English and German, and a picture
Step 2. Compulsively haunt a set of 5 or 6 websites where flats are posted to find potential flats. Many are listed for less than 24 hours on the bigger websites, because they get such a large response.
Step 3. Spend a lot of time on Google Translate and Google Maps Street View trying to figure out if there's some sort of strange condition in the listing (eg. must be willing to commit to 4 years, or must speak German, etc.) and if "centrally located" really means immediately adjacent to the train yard.
Step 4. Contact the agencies with flats that you're interested in. Many times this could be by email, so you have to work on writing a notice in German that made sense. Sometimes you have to call, which, for me, was usually an unmitigated disaster in which I got stage fright and would speak some disastrous mixture of high German, Swiss German, and English. Not pretty.
Step 5. Get tons of emails from agencies with the open house times. Get confused about which place is which, because you've literally sent messages of interest for over 20 flats. Realize that this a full-time job.
Step 6. Plan out an open house visiting timeline so as to hit all of the places you are interested in, even if they are in different parts of the city at the same time.
Step 7. Attend said open houses. Must be there at least 10 minutes early so that you're at the front of the line and can have the first chance. Usually there are at least 10 other people at the same time. The largest was an open house that lasted two hours, but I was given a 15-minute visit slot, along with 10 other people. This meant that there was 80 different people looking at this flat!
Step 8. Fill out application from the agency, and submit it, along with the packet put together in step #1.
Step 9. Wait. If you make the first agency cut (aka. if your salary is high enough), the agency will call all of your references.
Step 10. Hear something. Or not.
Step 11. Repeat steps 2-10 until you are successful.
In the end, I ended up being quite lucky. I mentioned to my officemates that I was looking for a flat after a few days of the above procedure, and one of them had happened to have just gotten an email through some colleagues who knew someone who was looking for someone for her 1.5 room flat in Schwamendingen. My officemate forwarded me the email, and I immediately contacted the person and had an appointment to see the flat the next day. It ended up being exactly what I wanted in the neighborhood that I wanted, so I applied for it that day, right before I went on a two-week vacation with my parents.
The day I left for vacation, I got a call from the landlady of the flat, who had gotten my application. She was willing to wait to make a decision until she could meet when I got back from vacation. (Thanks to my post-doc salary, I look like an attractive renter, especially for such a small flat.)
Accordingly, the day I got back from vacation, I met the landlady, saw the apartment again, and she informed me that I got it! Of course, this was all in German. Luckily, I had brought my colleague Laura with me, just in case I we didn't understand each other. I actually didn't understand when she told me I had the apartment, so Laura had to tell me after that I really had gotten it!
(I'd like to point out that this is the second time that I've found a flat a few hours after landing in Zürich. Apparently I make a better impression right after flying?)
A few days later I paid a massive deposit and signed the contract!
And that is how I found my own flat in Zürich.
