Our New Apartment

Hey,

Well it looks like we have managed to secure an apartment for ourselves. Yipee and a big WOW.

If you know anything about trying to rent an apartment in Sweden, then you would be amazed that we found an apartment.

It’s hard to explain Sweden’s renting process. It has taken me about 1 year to accept it and even now I still get surprised when I learn another little fact.

I'm going to give you a quick run down of what I understand it to be and then I will show the apartment. That way you will be really impressed by our luck, haha.

OK. So all housing in Sweden is closely regulated and every apartment building in Sweden is either built by or for the government. The government then decides to rent some and sell some. The rental apartments are handled by local governments and then they are rented out to whoever wants one. And if there are no free apartments then the local government will organise a waiting list

Now the problem is that back in the late 60's Stockholm got a little behind in supplying apartments and 50 years later they are way behind. So in Stockholm, some people have been in a waiting list for 15+ years. The general rule for Stockholm is, when you have a child you put your child in the waiting list so that when this child is 18 he/she might have a chance of getting a rental apartment.

There are also a couple of other things worth mentioning. When you get a first hand contract you can keep that for ever, there is no lease period it’s yours. Therefore the only time an apartment becomes available is when someone dies or someone buys a house (usually they keep the apartment as well and second hand rent it out). Therefore the queue doesn't really move at all. There is also a rumour that when you get an apartment you don’t loose your spot in the queue, you stay at the top of the queue, that has yet to be confirmed to me.

Now the way around this is to go black market this is where you can buy a first hand contract of an apartment. Highly illegal, especial now, and expensive but you get an apartment without having to wait 15 years in the queue.

Ok so. Bearing all of that in mind I think that we are EXTREMELY lucky to have got a first hand contract in Stockholm. However this contract is only a student contract which means we can only keep this place while Elin studies. Not as good but it suits us fine because in 3 years time we might be travelling again.

Anyway the apartment is at Hammarby Sjöstad. Hammarby Sjöstad (means Hammarby lake city) is a new city district close to water, just south of the Södermalm district. We can easily reach the city centre by ferry or the light rail link. Hammarby Sjöstad is counted as Stockholm and would be about a 10 minute ride on subway to the center of Stockholm. Hammarby Sjöstad kind of reminds me of Darling Harbour but with more emphasis on residents than shopping.

On the map you can't see the road that our apartment is on as it’s a new road and this map is not that great. However if you look to the right of the read dot you will see a street called "Badordsgatan" (means swimming community street) our apartment is across the street from the start of Badordsgatan.

This photo is of the tram station Luma, (its on that map, to the right of the dot).
















The apartment is brand new and is number 0241 on this floor plan (that link mightn't last long). The apartment is 60m2 with two rooms, much better than our little 1 roomer now. This is the street that our apartment is on. We are on the right, the white building. The big grass hill at the end of the street is a man made ski slope, only little but fun for a few hours.

Anyway that's it for now. We don't have any pictures of the apartment because they are still building and won't be finished until December. Also that means we can't move in until December but that’s fine as we have to give 3 months notice on where we live now.