Flat hunting in London

Flat hunting in London is a traumatic, tragic, and comic experience. This is more or less how it goes:

1) You look at websites, rightmove, findaproperty, primelocation, etc.

2) You see many overpriced properties.

3) The description is crap:

• some of the “features” include “dimmer light” and “power point”
• there is hardly ever a floor plan
• Occasionally you find the room size, but it’s in feet even if the UK has started to adopt the metric system in 1973.
• Some of the rooms are as small as 2.5×2.5m. Note that most of continental Europe rooms smaller than nine square meters are not considered habitable.
• The pictures only include the better rooms never the odd-shaped single room, which is always there.

4) When you find something that maybe works for you, you call the agency, normally to find out that the property has already been let.

5) After repeating the process a few times, you realise that all websites are out of date. Agencies are slow in putting new ads and leave them on the website to give the illusion that they have many properties available.

6) The websites are therefore only useful to give you an idea of the prices in different areas of the city and to find out the agencies that operate each area.

The process then changes as follows:

1) Find the areas that you can afford and that are not miles away from where you work.

2) Gather the name and phone number of the agencies in those areas.

3) Call the agencies to find out if they have anything available that is suitable for you.

…which is hardly the way in which the websites were intended to be used.