Posted by HSUNOJ (425 days ago)
Hi,
I just wanted to share a really good experience renting a villa at same price as locals. If you have the patience it’s worth the money. We relocated to Shanghai in Feb. and found our new home quite fast through our HR manager and the typical Xpat agencies. After a few months we decided that we would move closer to down town but didn’t want to pay the typical extra 40-50% that Xpats often do.
To be honest it wasn’t easy and it took a reliable Chinese friend and colleague a lot of time and much patience. We ended up with a 250 m2 villa with big terrace and garden; newly build compound, central air conditioning, double glazed windows and quality furniture bought by the landlord, but designed after our preferences and English speaking management. 15 min by car. from down town, 5 min walk to metro station, gym and pool.
This lead is not to offend real estate agencies but to give people a good choice if they are willing to get a really good deal and put some work into it.
I contacted several agencies (around 10) that advertised on the internet that they had a lot of experience dealing with Xpats. Meanwhile I also contacted a few local agencies and the result was that they all asked for our budget. After telling our budget we got to see a bunch of really expensive compounds with good service but we had to pay 40-50% more than locals for the same “product”. Then I contacted other agencies and cut our budget down to half while I also told some that we didn’t have any budget but we would come up with a good offer if we found a place that lived up to our expectations. To come up with a good offer we found out the apprx. buying price, interests rates for mortgage loans and calculated what the landlord approximately would have of expenses on the house. That helped a lot. When we found a nice place we got our Chinese friend to contact the agency or landlord to ask for a price and he got a much better price than we did. We then negotiated price incl. new furniture and all electrical appliances for laundry room and kitchen and got the real estate agent to help buying our tailor made furniture for a small extra payment. The result was: a fair deal for our landlord (the renting price is what the agencies describe as “low end budget”), furniture incl. garden furniture for the whole house for 13000 RMB at our landlord expence (we sketched the furniture our self and picked all materials such as solid wood and quality fabrics). While saving a lot of money on housing people can either choose to be paid the remaining “housing budget” or saving the company some money or use it for maid and driver and car, or this is also a good way if you don’t have a housing budget at all or just want a fair deal.
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