Boligjagten – apartment hunting in Denmark

If you have a friend in Denmark, you’ve heard for sure how difficult is to rent a good apartment. Perhaps you’ve also heard about high deposits and lack of their repayment. I would really like to deny it, but I can’t. Looking for a flat is like looking for a needle in a haystack!

We got the notice from a current local. I didn’t worry. We will find something better, with a bigger kitchen, shower in the bathroom and spacious rooms. Will be wonderful! After all, I was moving four times already. The only difference is that before I was looking for a room, now we would like to rent the whole apartment. But how it was til now?

• I started with the Polish hotel on Nørrebro. We had a double room, permission to keep the dog and registration (to have residence is very important due to official matters). Luxury was the bathroom in the room and electric stove.
• From there I moved to Rødovre, where I rented a very small room from a Polish guy. I found his ad on the website polonia.dk. I had to move out after a while, cause owner’s friend was coming to take my place. Just to remind, having a dog doesn’t make searching easier…
• This time I found a room with a private bathroom in Brønshøj, on one of facebook groups. Unfortunately, the place wasn’t good, so I was happy to receive a call from Sylwia (I met her in Rødovre, she was renting the other room in Polish guy’s apartment), that there is one room in her current place.
• That room was in a flat on Nørrebro. Sylwia’s friend was going back to Australia, so she took his room, and I got the other one. (By the way, I didn’t get my deposit from Brønshøj back). I was living there til my other friend had told me, they were leaving the apartment in Rødovre, so maybe I was interested.
• I was, as it was the time of Jerzy’s arrival. And we are here til now. But the time of change has come.

My past experiences indicate friends and web portals as the main source of housing ads. However, there are basically only rooms on polonia.dk or fb groups. And my friends has no offers for me so far. What left, is to follow the advertisements on dba.dk, and there are plenty, but some of them are false, and we don’t receive any answer from the others. The second option is to pay for access to landlords’ contact details on websites like boligportal.dk. We subscribed for 400 crowns (57 euro) for two months… without any effect. There are not so many advertisements as we expected. Still, we send e-mails wherever we can, but usually, we just get an automatic response that the place had been rented. We just went to see a house once. It was located 30 km from Copenhagen, but the owners have chosen somebody else.
There is one more possibility. There are social housing organizations. There are plenty of them, naturally, you have to pay to sign up. Even then you can wait a dozen or so years to get it, depends on the location. Therefore, despite the fact that we signed up, we cannot expect to get a flat within two weeks.

This is how the situation on danish housing market looks like. I still think, that we will find our place, that we will not spend Christmas under the sky. However, the shadow of anxiety sneaks in. I do my best to wash it away. It won’t do any good. I must believe the perfect flat is waiting for us on the first of December.