How to find an apartment to rent
Before I moved to Sweden, “finding an apartment is difficult” meant that it's taking me more than a week to find one with a dishwasher, nice furniture, a boiler, an AC, my favorite internet provider, a reasonable price and a location within 10 minutes from my workplace.
After I moved to Sweden, “finding an apartment is difficult” became “if you get anything in this town and not the one 60km from here, you don’t ask for pictures, you don’t ask anything, you run and take it and say thank you very much”. Then praise the gods if it took less than half a year.
Rent control means that when you actually get a förstahandskontrakt (meaning renting directly from the landlord company), the price will be pretty bearable. And you get all the service: anything broken or needs replacement — just make a call or send a message.
The problem is that to get this ‘first-hand contract’ in any of the bigger and/or student cities (including, for instance, Linköping, population 163000) you need to either stand in a queue for years or get creative. So it's quite customary to only have the most basic information about the apartment when you express interest.
The queue route
Be born a Swede, get a personnummer, sign up for the queues in all major Swedish cities when you turn 18. Some of those won’t be free (e.g. to queue in Malmö costs 300:- a year), but who knows where your studies or your work will take you? In a few years you’ll be able to rent.
Some stats for context. At the time of updating this post in November 2024, there's one person who's been standing in the queue in Stockholm since 1980. 501 have been there since 1988. 5998 since 2003. And 74 055 since 2024. (Source)
Not all of them are interested in the same area of Stockholm or the same size of the apartment, but, well, it's competitive.
Here are some prices: the bars on the graph show the number of apartments falling into a particular price bracket, e.g. 8–10k kronor is the most popular price, with 2757 apartments. You can play with the districts, number of rooms, etc here.
So this is definitely a route into the rental market, but it's a long one in the bigger cities. Keep in mind that some towns have a “moving in” bonus, for example giving new arrivals 300 points when they register in the queue (one point usually means one day standing in the queue). But there might be conditions attached to it, like you have to do the registration within a year or something similar.
The network route
If you have an employer or any kind of network, ask around if anyone knows a landlord or somebody working for one. It happens that when you contact a landlord directly, they have absolutely nothing available, but when their old friend or business partner calls and speaks in Swedish without accent, an apartment materializes in a month or two. This was how I got my first apartment in Sweden.
The small/private landlord route
Hunt the smaller landlords. They do exist. Sometimes they own just a couple of buildings and maintaining any sort of a queue is overhead for them. Contact them directly and ask if they have anything. If you have a permanent job and pay your bills on time, they might be happy to have you. Offer to show them your employment contract if they're hesitating because you've just arrived and Skatteverket, the tax agency, doesn't have a record of you paying taxes for years (and therefore having had income for years).
To find out where the small landlords are, go to the municipality’s website and look for something like “Bygga och bo”, “Hyresvärdar” or “Hitta bostad”. There will be a list of names, addresses and phone numbers. If you have a particular area in mind or if the internet doesn’t seem to have up-to-date data, just go and look at the buildings — they usually have the name of the caretaker somewhere.
The personal ad route
There are lots of websites with apartments (and houses) for rent, but not all of the market is visible there. With the off-the-charts demand, a lot of landlords are not keen on being flooded with hundreds of replies to every ad of theirs, so instead they're reading the personal ads put up by aspiring tenants. Here's the section of Blocket.se where this happens, the key words are “Önskas hyra” — renting wanted:
Basically what you want to do in such an ad is explain how your economy is stable, and how you're not going to destroy the apartment with your fancy smoking parties 24/7 or whatnot. I found a house to rent by publishing an ad like that. Lots of inspiration was drawn from the ads of other families.
I think there are facebook groups where one could also post something like this, I'd search by the name of the town/municipality you're looking in.
The second-hand route
If none of this works, an alternative to förstahandskontrakt is andrahandskontrakt — renting from someone who got lucky to get a förstahandskontrakt or who has their own apartment. These contracts are more expensive and always temporary: for example, to be able to rent out an apartment one owns, they have to have a reason like a one-year job contract in another municipality. On the bright side, andrahandskontrakt apartments are usually furnished.
Websites of note
- Blocket → Lägenheter → Uthyres and Blocket → Lägenheter → Önskar hyra: look for apartments and/or write that you’re looking to rent
- Qasa: mostly andrahandskontrakt, the service is free for the tenants
- Kvalster: looks old-school but aggregates apartment ads from different sources pretty well
- Willhem: they own 25k+ apartments
- HomeQ: usually only few expensive options, but the service itself is free and the contracts are i förstahand
- Facebook: search for bostad/lägenhet uthyres + the town name.
What the landlords look for
- permanent employment
- no history of missed payments and debts (no betalningsanmärkningar)
- no pets
- no smoking
- no partying and no trouble (especially if it's a private individual's apartment: they don't want their neighbors to be pissed at them).