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by lingoberry 4198 days ago
This is the biggest problem. There really is no rental market to speak of, so talking about rental queues being 10 years long is not really relevant. If you want to live in Stockholm for a longer time you need to buy. This also means it takes months and months getting your loan approved, finding an apartment and waiting to move in. Only the waiting to move in part can take more than 3 months.

The flip side is, once you've bought a place, it can be really really cheap to live in with the current interest rates. We pay less than $1000 for a two bedroom in central Stockholm for instance, all included (interest, fees, electricity, water, heating, tv, broadband). This also means absolute prices are insanely high, and will probably continue to rise since there's still room for it to grow.
1 comments
seivan 4198 days ago
Months of getting your loan approved? At _MOST_ its takes a week. This is also been the subject of many issues connected to the rising prices. Low interest rate == easy loans dishing out.

It takes more time to actually find a decent place you like than to secure the loan. That took a month for us. We saw 30 apartments.

Btw bids on two apartments. One was a low ball and they didn't want it. The second one the price rose 200k (SEK) before I won.

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lingoberry 4198 days ago
No, I didn't mean it takes months to get your loan approved for most people. It did for us though, since we moved from abroad, having no work history in Sweden and no jobs at that point. That means you have to get two job offers first (for a couple) and that takes time. During this time you are looking at apartments but can't bid since you haven't secured a loan. Then comes the looking part, which for us took maybe 2 months. There was a lull in availability (and extreme competition between bidders), and we were outbid for everything. When we finally found one, and outbid another couple (price rose 700SEK btw), we had to wait another 3 months to move in.

Everybody's experience is different, but I think we can agree this is madness and not good for our economy. I rarely have much positive to say about the US, but one thing is that you can literally go to almost any city (except maybe SF and NYC), live in a hotel, and within a week you have found some place to live. Might not be the highest standard of living, but you can always trade up.

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seivan 4198 days ago
I had the same experience as you in terms of previous work history. I just moved back to Sweden and had approx 1 month job history (and not even full-time but a trial). Got my loan approved in a single day. Called back a week later to expand the amount I wanted to loan.

I got the "lånelöfte" (guarantee to loan) from the bank in a single phone call which allowed me to bid.

May I ask what bank you went to? I can add that I had the necessary 15% but outside the country.

They never asked about it, nor previous work history.

Also, I don't have a Swedish name if you were wondering :-)

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