Renting in Edinburgh - a neverending saga

Edinburgh is a pretty nice place to visit, and sometimes even live in. But renting here has had its ... challenges.

Gentlemen, a short view back to the past

Y1

It all started in 2015, as a University of Edinburgh freshman. When I got out of the Airlink and asked the driver for directions, I shockingly realised that I can't understand Scottish. Who could have expected that, given that I learned English by watching American TV shows? Choosing to take TOEFL over IELTS might have been a bit of a hint now that I look back.

In your first year, the uni lets you stay in one of their accommodations for a pretty reasonable price given the market. Most of them are primo stuff.

The difference in price between catered and un-catered was when my class self-awareness was born. My first year accommodation was un-catered, but close enough to Pollock Halls to have dinner there sometime and be a bit envious of all the rich kids.

I was extremely culinary challenged. The lowest point in my first year was making a pizza using a Sainsbury's pre-made dough, pasta sauce, olives, and ... fried eggs.

I've since gained the patience to scroll past the author's life stories on recipe pages.

The flat was nice and warm, the flatmates were alright so I couldn't really complain about anything. It was a nice enough time.

But the Uni lures you into a false sense of security, only to boot you in the deep end of Edinburgh's rental market at the end of your first year. Reminded me of my first attempt at learning how to swim. Both had the same result.

Towards the end of the year, I started looking for a flat with one of my friends. Our two-person group quickly grew to 3, then to 4, then 5, then shrunk back to 4, then only me and my friend were left. I'll spare you all the drama that went with it. The end result is that we lost a lot of time and we found ourselves without a flat for next year, in mid-May, really close to our flights home.

I was thinking of giving up and switching to a uni back home, but a friend of a friend was looking for two flatmates for the low low price of £320 per month (in 2016).

What a boon!

We rushed to a viewing, promptly ignored all the red flags, signed the tenancy agreement and went back home happy with ourselves.

Y2

That was the worst flat I have ever lived in and I vowed to never be put in a position to live in a place like that again.

It had the worst mice infestation I've ever seen. It was honestly remarkable given that it was on the 4th floor. I routinely found droppings in my shoes, in the bathroom, in the dish rack. I'm sure I can still find some of them in my soul.

The mice were some sort of mutants that developed a taste for eating poisoned grains. The only thing those achieved was colour their droppings blue. The washing machine was much more efficient at killing mice, at the cost of having to bury them in the bin, wrapped in our clothes which they loved so much. I'll spare you the photos this time.

The fridge was broken all the time. Our landlord was un-contactable, which led me to be on the contract for one extra year after I left that place even though I stopped paying. Hell, if someone looks hard enough, I might still figure as a tenant there.

My room's external concrete wall had four sizeable holes in it. I still don't understand what those were about. A Google search said this was for ventilation? Jury's still out, but what's certain is that they made winter fun. I plugged them up as best as I could, but ended up having to put my bed next to the heater and sleeping with it on. Finding the optimal distance between the bed and the heater took a few iterations. It was a sort of IRL binary search that either left me with a runny nose in the morning or with burns on my elbows.

My friend's room had a strong and persistent mold smell that made it really hard to breathe. We soon found out why.

We all know that correlation does not mean causation, but every heavy rain outside seemed to be suspiciously accompanied by a lighter rain inside. In the wise words of a Ferrari engineer, must be the water.

Y3 part 1 - the return to FC

After gaining so much life experience in such a short amount of time, I was excited to return to uni accommodation. The by-any-means-necessary kind of excited.

So I did what every other *cough* economically-challenged Eastern European student did and became an RA.

The math was simple. You paid like a fraction of the rent, at the cost of having a sort-of-permanent part-time job. I was dreaming of getting a spot in catered place, but alas, it was not to be. I ended up, once again, in my first-year accommodation.

The math did not check out. I was fooled by all of my RA friends into believing that it was an easy job, that RAs generally had each others' backs and that wardens were people who understood that this job was something students were doing for survival and that their studies still took priority.

Reality was, of course, different. I never got along with my team. Part of it was my fault. I made some initial blunders (it was basically my first real job), uni was getting harder, my summer project extended well into November and I ended up being excluded from the informal team event planning meetings. My grades started to suffer and all the extra pressure led to other issues down the line.

None of this would have happened if I could have just afforded a nice place to live in.

Y3 part 2

No longer being an RA meant that I had to once again find some place to rent. In January, this turned out to be surprisingly easy. Some guy was finishing his PhD and wanted to take a much needed break as a Research Assistant someplace else.

Bonus points: it was just 5 mins away from where I was staying, so moving out was quick. Leaving that job and that flat, with my friends helping me move out in the middle of the night, is a very fond memory. It felt a bit like the good ending of Disco Elysium.

People in the flat were amazing, super friendly and the price was alright. One of my flatmates was the kind of person who'd randomly go on and win The Voice effortlessly. The only shower recitals I didn't mind hearing.

The flat itself though was ground floor. That winter was very snowy, so it was cold as shit. The front door had a bit of a gap on the bottom and my room was next to it. This meant that mice were pretty fond of my room and the warmth it offered, however scant. Their excitement was readily apparent given all the fun they were having under my bed. I can still remember all the jolly noises they were making while I was trying to fall asleep in my heavy woollen sweater.

Whenever someone says that mice are cute, I nod politely, tag them as an absolutely mental person and move on with my life.

Y4 and beyond

End of Y3, me and the ol' Y2 buddy from earlier were back on the rental market. The uni had a hidden treasure trove of private flats they owned and every year they'd hold a raffle to decide which students get the honor and privilege of renting them.

Every year so far I'd lost that raffle.

Renting privately was still too expensive for me at that point, but luck smiled upon us and a common acquaintance was moving out of one of them. With a semi-legal move that bypassed the whole random aspect of the affair, we managed to inherit it.

Was it ideal? For a student it was. A Tesco below us, no mice, the computer labs 5 mins away, what more could you want?! You take the good with the bad. Used needles, frequent peeing on the front door, and random drug-fueled screams in the middle of the night were honestly an acceptable cost. The cold didn't even bother me anymore.

A short post-uni stint

I was pretty excited for the first flat I'd rented after uni. I could finally afford something nice! Even decided to pay extra and go with an agency that had pretty good reviews.

Just before I moved in, the upstairs neighbor sensed my excitement and flooded his flat. That meant that two of my bedroom walls got water damage and instantly went moldy.

I slept on the couch for a couple of months, which wasn't too bad. But then my boiler broke, got repaired, and then it just kept breaking. My toilet was in a freaking cupboard, without any air extractor. So, you had to choose between the smell and the cold.

Choosing the third option, I declared Edinburgh's rental market the victor then promptly fucked off.

A short view back to ... the present?

I thought I'd seen the last of Edinburgh, but life had other plans.

Leaving Cambridge and temporarily moving back home meant that I had the absolute freedom to find a job anywhere in Europe, really.

Like an inveterate gambler, I just couldn't resist another spin. Surely, this time it would be better and surely the rental market couldn't possibly get worse in 5 years.

So I began exploring my options.

Agents

Since I'd had so much success with agents in the past, I figured - why not give them another try?

None of the ones I contacted answered their phone, or my emails. None offered virtual viewings (did they learn nothing from Covid?).

So, what this meant is that in order to rent a flat I needed to already live in Edinburgh or close by. Found a few AirBNBs at absolutely obscene prices (it was the end of spring), and the hotels weren't much better.

Thus, renting through an agency was out of the question.

OpenRent

I'm still confused as to what the point of this thing is. On paper, the idea is that you go past having to deal with agents and deal with landlords directly, through a streamlined process.

I just ... don't think that it actually works. They ask you to pay for the privilege of giving them all your data through what basically amounts to a full background check, only to then tell you that you're #32 in the queue for a viewing.

Built-for-renters flats

These are very expensive flats, in new builds, generally managed by a company that has several of these things spread across the UK. I was getting a bit desperate, so I figured I could stay in one for a few months until I found something long-term.

Found about three companies offering such flats. One of them didn't answer my email or phone calls (I'm still not sure whether it was a scam, honestly), another one had two stars with like a hundred negative Google Reviews, so I arranged a viewing with the remaining one.

I filled in a form, and scheduled an online viewing for the following day. Promising, I thought. A few hours after that, I get a phone call from Manchester. Turned out to be an AI agent, calling me on behalf of this company, to ask me all of the information I had just filled in.

It was such an eerie experience, it couldn't understand anything I was saying. It also rubbed me the wrong way, like I would be paying them a small fortune every month and they couldn't be bothered to have a real person call me? Not the premium experience I expected.

I was willing to overlook it, and just tag it as some failed experiment fueled by the AI-craze. Next day though, some guy from the same company emails me, asking me the same information I filled in on that initial form.

That really pissed me off, so I cancelled the viewing and left them a very polite "get your shit together" message (no, really, it was very polite).

That clearly left an impression. They were so positively thrilled to get more feedback from me that they tried to reach me using four different numbers from four different cities for the better part of half an hour. I went and took a shower while my phone was ringing, only to come back to an email from them titled "Your application for a viewing has been rejected" (?!?!?!?!?).

SpareRoom (ongoing)

Without any choice left, I was back to SpareRoom. Similar to things like democracy and capitalism, it's the least bad choice.

I've reached a point in which my inner DM tells me to roll for sanity every time I open that accursed application.

It's just pure chaos, but I'd split my experiences there into two:

Time wasters

• People who don't put what they're actually looking for in the ad;
• Incomplete ads and lies by omission: flat's only available for a few months, the desk you see will not be there once the current tenant leaves, the pictures are from a few years ago, putting in the number of current tenants rather than the number of bedrooms, saying that it's not a student flat only to then allow students to rent a room, doctored photos, saying that there'll be only professionals only to rent to students, etc.
• This year, it's the first time I've been ghosted on an online viewing.

What are you even on about?

• One person was renovating their kitchen and came up with the brilliant idea of renting one of their bedrooms while that was being done. For the cheap price of £1100 without bills. A bargain, really. Who needs things to be quiet, or ... a kitchen?
• The flat's washing machine being in a closet in my room. Just imagine the landlord casually strolling into your room to put a wash on. That one was £1000.
• People pretty nonchalantly changing the price you had both previously agreed on. Hell, one ad had three different prices for the same room.
• Multiple rooms with the flat's fridge inside of them (what on earth is going on??). I'm half tempted to rent one of these, install a lock then go on vacation.
• Looking at one ad's photos, I couldn't find the shower anywhere. It had a bathroom, that had a sink, and a toilet, but no shower. It turned out to be a shower cabin ... hidden in a closet ... in the bedroom ... next to the closet that would hold my clothes. Didn't even seem to have an air extractor.
• If the ad contains words like "deluxe" or "premium", some wild shit is coming. There was this attic room that had an en-suite, plates, mugs, a kettle and a fridge (in reality, a mini-fridge that could only hold a few soda cans). All of it presented as a self-sufficient room. It was also heavily implied that the lodger shouldn't use the kitchen downstairs. It wasn't a festival let, just to be clear.
• "Furnished" rooms that are missing things like a wardrobe or a mattress or a desk. Looking at an ad always turns into a fun little find what's missing from this picture mini-game.
• Lots and lots of flats and buildings that look and smell like they haven't been cleaned in half a century.

Closing thoughts

In the end, I did find something to rent. But it's a bit too expensive, so I'm back on the market...

Godspeed to all of us renters.