Girl With a Suitcase

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I had been told moving to London and finding a flat to share was hard. I knew it would have been even harder for me, because I wanted to find a female flatshare in London, which is a pretty big restriction. And I was prepared to see terrible houses, I swear. But the first week here was honestly a tougher time than I expected!

It is funny, though, to think how easy it could have been! Find a female flatshare in London (but I would say a flatshare in general) is a full-time job, and you clearly have to go through some difficulties. But, God, if only I knew then what I know now! I am sure it would have been much easier.

That is exactly why I am writing this: every day thousands of people move to London, and just a few of them already have a house. The great majority arrives here with a suitcase, some money, no place to stay…and starts looking for a flatshare with no idea of what they are doing. Moreover, many of these new arrivals are women. I really admire those who can live with complete strangers in a mixed house, but for many reasons I wished I could find a house with only girls. Many women feel like I do, they would like to find a female flatshare in London but then they are overwhelmed with difficulties. In this article, I want to share some useful tips to find a female flatshare in London based on what I wish someone had told me 2 weeks ago. These tips are valuable to find a flatshare in general, or a male only house as well. Just the final advice about the agency that helped me is strictly to find a female flatshare in London, all the rest are valuable tips to make your search simpler…or at least more informed! So read on if you want your search to be easier and less stressful than mine.

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  Be prepared, it is going to be difficult: thinking about it is a luxury you can’t afford

You probably already know it from that friend/relative/random stranger who told you about his friend’s sister terrible experience when looking for a flatshare in London. We all arrive prepared to it. What we don’t understand until we are into it is…WHY? What the hell makes London real estate market so crazy? The answer is as simple as that: overpopulation. This just means that everything is terribly quick, and there is no time to think or ponderate at all. Once an apartment is offered (online, through an agency, on social networks…) it is a matter of minutes or even less before someone calls to see it! You could call 30 minutes after it went online, and be told it is already gone. Or even worse, you could be on your way to see it and suddenly your phone rings……”sorry, no need for you to come, someone else has taken it”. They could even not show up at all, and let you waiting in the street without answering the phone (and London is well known for bad weather, right?). It is the most frustrating thing ever, I swear. And every experience described here was personally and carefully experienced by the writer, so you can trust me.

This is something you have to deal with, of course you can’t change it. But if you keep it in mind whenever you go to see a house, it can make your search so much easier! If I knew it two weeks ago, I would have probably found a house on my third day in London: I went to see a house that was nice, shared with females, and had a very nice room facing on the Thames and the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. But I wasn’t totally convinced, and I had a viewing later on that day in a nicer house. So I told the agent I would let her know by the morning after. The second house was actually much nicer, with lovely girls and no agency involved…but the flatmates told me they had to see other people before deciding (that’s another problem I am going to explain in the next paragraph). Guess what? Not only I was not accepted for the second house, but when I called back the agency from the first one that morning they told me it was gone, too. From 2 options to 0 in just a few seconds.

So, first lesson:

If you like it and you have a chance to secure it, then go! The person after you will not be so stupid. And be assured, there is a person straight after you.

• You may like it…but they may not like you the same way!

As I was saying above, unfortunately it is not just a matter of timing. It is like falling in love: it may be the right moment, it may have all the features you are looking for…but if it is not returned, there cannot be a love story.

Most of the houses you are going to see, especially the ones without an agency (sounds interesting, no agency fees, wow…well, keep reading), have another problem to deal with. The current flatmates will be making a selection of the candidates and, again, there will be a lot of candidates to choose between! You may be the funniest, nicest, dearest person in the world, but what if they are looking for someone completely opposite to you? And even if they don’t, can you wait one week for them to meet all the possible candidates before letting you know? Of course not. That’s why finding a female flatshare in London without an agency gets complicated, and the agency fee starts feeling more attractive.

Then, the second lesson is:

If the flatmates are making a selection, use your best weapons: presents, nice messages, corruption…it is a war out there and you need to win it. But most of all, remember to ask them to let you know in the shortest possible time (if you get to set a deadline is better). You don’t want to keep thinking about that lovely house you are waiting for ,when you see the next 30…

 

• Choose your search tools carefully to minimize the noise as much as possible

There are basically 2 ways to find a flatshare in London: offline or online. The first one will probably be more expensive, because you will have to pay the agency fees, and it is a problem if you are looking to find a female female flatshare in London because they won’t probably have any. Their job is to find tenants for a house in the shortest time possible, so that they can get the money. Restricting this search and accepting only a specific gender is just a waste of time for them! Anyway, if you want to go with an agency, my best tip is:

Go looking for an agency in east London. I don’t know why, but when I went to west London I couldn’t find even one that rented out single rooms, just entire (and expensive) flats. While, as I later found out, in the area of Shoreditch/Bethnal Green/Mile End in particular it is full of agencies, you will just have to walk in, explain them what you need, and see what they offer you.

If you’d prefer to do it on your own, then you need to look online. There are plenty of possibilities here, but Facebook groups (just type in “London flatshare” and you will find tons of them) and specialized websites are the most useful. Speaking of the latter, the most famous for London are Spareroom, Easyroommate and Gumtree (but there are many more!). The latter is a sort of Ebay, but it has a good amount of ads for spare rooms as well, so it is pretty easy to use, you just read the description and “buy” it (at least, see it) as you would do for online shopping. Many have found a room this way, but it’s not great if you want to filter the results more than that.

Spareroom, Easyroommate and all the others are specialized sites where you can create a profile with a “room wanted” ad and search through the results. They are free, but they usually have an Early Bird option that comes with a cost (usually about £10 for one week) that allows you to contact the advertiser of new posted rooms. It is useless to say that having a premium account is ESSENTIAL: as I said before, the market is soooooo quick that if you are not able to contact the advertiser on the first day, you are not probably going to find anything. A room that has been online for more than a week is probably not worth seeing it. And don’t let a couple of nice pictures fool you! I have literally seen houses whose photographers were masters of Photoshop! One was a £180 single room near Hyde Park, which should have been cheap enough to make me understand there was something wrong, and it had these lovely pictures of a small but cosy room, a nice large, bright kitchen and a huge bathroom with an incredibly long bath tub. It looked amazing! Well, it was kind of nice, but it was in a basement, the room had no window and a persistent smell of damp, and the bathroom looked like a cave with a perfectly normal-size bath tub. I would like to shake hands with whoever took those pictures.

So, as you have to pay to be on those websites (at least if you want it to be useful), you will probably have to choose one…but which?

You will soon realize how much noise you go through when you are looking for flatshare: you start receiving so many emails you don’t even have time to see them all, or you find a house that is perfect but then you realize it will just be available from next month or, if you are trying to find a female flatshare in London, you only come across mixed houses. It is essential to filter all that noise, in order to avoid waisting time on houses that do not meet your needs, and go straight to what you want. For this, I think the best option in SpareRoom.

SpareRoom has an amazing system of filters: first, you can search by location, travel zone (zone 1 to 2, zone 3 only, etc), tube line (so useful! You can live in a completely different area from where you work, but until it is on the same tube line it will be a nice journey…well, if you don’t have to get on at peak hours, but this is another story) or even commute duration (you set your destination, e.g. your work place, and the maximum amount of time you want it to take you to get there…it will show you all the options within that duration). And this is just the basic search! Then, with the advanced search, you can set your maximum budget, the size of the room, if you want a living room (trust me, this is so important, it is not easy to find a house that has it but without it you are just going to rent your own tiny bedroom with no social space to hang out!), the kind of flatmates you want and…ta-daaaan!!! You can also select the option to find a female flatshare only!

Eventually, once you have set all your filters, you can save your search and receive email alerts for it. Save more than one search, so you will be able to match the results (for example, if your workplace is near two or more different tube lines, you will need to save a different search for each line).

Another advice I would give you is to save a search “perfect house” where you select all the options you would like to have in your dream flatshare. This way, every time a house with all the requisites comes out, you will receive an email and you will know it is a house you would like, meaning that you will give total priority to that one and eliminate all the noise!

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•  When you find your perfect flatshare with a perfect room in a perfect location, and you think that the nightmare is over…be sure you can prove you can afford it.

Before coming to London, I had never been asked from an agency for an employment letter, references or worse, for my payroll! I even thought the last one was illegal. But here is normal, and in most places they are not going to rent you a room if you can’t prove that you can pay for it. In my case, this was a problem, because my internship wage could not even closely cover the cost of life in London alone, and I needed other sources of money to survive (read: my parent’s help). But how do you prove it? What proof do you provide, if there is nothing with your name written of it? Even worse if you still have to find a job, I guess! Usually in these situations, they ask you to pay 3 months in advance, two of which will be kept as a deposit until you move out. And house rents here are not cheap. Moreover, there is always a chance the deposit is not going to be refunded when you leave, because they often try to charge you for things you supposedly have broken or damaged (try to explain them you didn’t, then. Another tip: take pictures of EVERYTHING when you enter the room, so you will have a proof if needed).

The matter gets worse if you are not sure whether you can trust the people who are asking you the money: I had found this beautiful house I liked very much and I was ready to move in, when a similar mess came out. The people who were supposed to rent me the room were a couple from some East European country, whose english I could barely understand, that told me the house was from a friend of them who lived abroad and asked me to pay 3 months in advance to their company (which was not an agency); I can believe they didn’t have any bad intention, but giving more than £2000 to these guys sounded a bit suspect, at least.

Be prepared to provide a proof that you can afford the room, or at least ask very clearly what do you need to provide in order to move in. Don’t trust people who seem suspect, not only as you would probably like to have your deposit back when you move out, but especially because you don’t want your live-out landlord to ignore your calls for days if your boiler breaks during the winter.

I could tell you many other things about how to find a room in London, but these are mainly the lessons I had to learn the hard way and I wanted to share with who will be passing through it next. If you are girl wanting to find a female flatshare in London, a mixed one, a gay-friendly or whatever, I am sure these advices will be useful to all of you.

 

If you can, try to avoid staying in a shared dorm in a hostel during your search. Even if it is the cheapest option and it could be nice to meet other people in your situation, it would make your time much more stressful. You wouldn’t have space for your stuff, showering would become a nightmare, sleeping could be even worse…and you don’t know how long you are going to be searching for.

I can tell you that 1 week is pretty much a normal amount of time. Less than that you are really lucky, more than that…maybe you should start to make some compromise.

A sofa at a friend’s place, a room from a distant relative, couchsurfing can all be good solutions in order to make this initial stressful period a bit better.

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Are you wondering how did I eventually find my place? Well, as I said at the beginning, it was so easy that it is almost funny to think about all that I have been through to find it. After seeing many houses and facing many negative experiences (the ones I wrote about are not even half of the places I saw, guys), I decided to use SpareRoom as I suggested here, adding a new filter I hadn’t used before: “agents only”. It turns out that in East London, near Brick Lane, there is a nice agency called G G LINK that has many beautiful properties in the area, all nicely decorated and with normal-size rooms, which they rent mainly to students or young professionals and…they have many girls-only flatshares. In just one afternoon I saw 5 different properties, and the day after I was already moving in. No dramas, no problems…just a nice place to call HOME, in the end!

I really hope this post will help someone finding the same, hopefully in a shorter time and with less stress!

If you have already been through it and want to share any comment, suggestion, add-on to what I said, please leave a message!

If you are looking for a female flatshare in London instead, or just for a place to call HOME whatever it is, I hope this was useful and…GOOD LUCK!