Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dalke 4883 days ago
It's crazy hard in Gothenburg, at least for some place I wanted to live. I've heard that Stockholm is worse. If you're a single person, willing to share an apartment with someone else, then you can rent just a room ("inneboende"). That's likely the easiest. You can also look for a sublease ("andrahandskontrakt"). But getting a lease ("förstahandskonrakt") is hard. Parts of town require you to be on a waiting list which can be up to 5 years long. For Gothenburg, I was on the list for 1.5 years for a lease before we gave up and moved to the smaller city of Trollhättan.

No startup scene, but a 1,300 sq. ft. apartment in the center of town (3bd, 1.5 ba) goes for only $1,500/month, and the commuter train to Gothenburg takes about 45 minutes.

If you have money you can get a "business apartment" for about 2x the normal rate. Those are pretty easy to find. But you'll need to have a business first (even one in the US) to rent it.

You can get an idea of what's available using the aggregator http://kvalster.se/Stockholm . When a place is "1 rum" it means studio, "2 rum" means "living room and bedroom", etc. As a decent approximation, 1sq meter is 10 sq. feet.

Rates in the tech area of Kista look about $700 for a shared room/studio. In Södermalm I see prices more around $800 for a room/studio, though you can pay a lot more. (350 sq. ft studio apartment, furnished, for one month rental while the owner is overseas, $1264 for the month.)

1 comments

Förstahandskontrakt is more like 17 years in the most popular parts (Vasastan in Stockholm).

It is possible to get a sublet or such but it tends to be expensive and quite time consuming. A lot of scams going around as well so one has to be careful. Prices indicated above seem quite accurate.

17 years? Wow! Last I read was a couple of years ago, and it was definitely only about 5 then.

But when I first moved to Gbg it was easy to get a 2nd-hand contract. Now it's nearly impossible. I read that there was a change ~5 years ago in the law to make it financially better for the Bfr to switch from rental to co-op, so I can see how that would also affect Stockholm.

Well, if I want my children to retire in Vasastan then I should put their name on the list soon. (And have children, but that ruins the joke.)