How to find a cheap serviced apartment
Serviced apartments, which are almost always fully-furnished and include pots and pans and plates and such in addition to having regular housecleaning service, are ideal for those who are going to be in a place longer than they’d want to stay in a hotel. Many of these serviced apartments are rented through deep-pocketed employers, and this variety of ‘executive rental’ tends to be so expensive and profit-margins are so high that they crowd the cheap serviced apartments out of the listings.
What’s not obvious though is that cheaper serviced apartments are available in almost all areas, but they tend to be much harder to find. Simply Googling “cheap serviced apartments in (city name)” is still likely to pull up the same list of outrageously priced apartment buildings. Below we’ll discuss some ways you can find a cheap serviced apartment when they aren’t otherwise easy to find.
1 – Check Craigslist
By now most people are aware of craigslist.org, which is nothing but classified ads, but not everyone realizes they now cover nearly every large city on earth. Unfortunately, you’ll often find mostly the expensive apartments clogging the listings under either “apts/housing” or “sublets/temporary,” but many of the cheaper places post there as well. It can be weird to see some apartments renting for about a third of what most others are going for, but the differences between them may be small.
One strategy that might not be immediately obvious is to look at the posts for the cheaper places, even if they aren’t specifically what you are interested in, because they’ll often be placed by real estate companies that handle many different buildings. As I’ll discuss in the following point, certain real estate companies tend to handle listings in all price ranges, while others only concentrate on the high end.
2 – Find a local real estate agent
This might not occur to some people, but in fact some real estate agents handle even the cheaper serviced apartment buildings. Sure, there’s not a big profit in renting out really cheap apartments for between one and six months at a time, which is why most agents don’t do it. But those who do can usually get a tenant into an apartment with only one or two quick visits, so it still works out for them.
Many real estate sites that handle rentals will have a search function where you can specify a price range. On many of these sites you’ll see that their lowest price tier is way more than you want to spend, but others do list the cheap places as well.
The commissions are almost always paid by the apartment building, and in some cases the agent can actually negotiate a lower price for the apartment than you’d get yourself walking in off the street. If they have a good relationship and do a lot of business together the building knows that offering a discount will make the agent bring people there instead of somewhere else. This happens less often in high season in certain places, but it’s worth considering.
3 – Ask on local expat websites
Nearly every city that has serviced apartments will also have a fairly active expat community, and you can be sure that that community will have at least one major forums website where they all stay in touch and trade tips. So if you are having trouble finding a cheap serviced apartment through the methods above just find the busiest local expat site and search their forums for “serviced apartments.”
Chances are this will lead you to one or more long threads where someone has asked about this in the past, and the locals will have posted all the decent options they are aware of. If you don’t find a thread like this you can, of course, start a new one, which will get you the most current information including specifics of what you are looking for. At least a few of the more helpful members will be able to get you on the right track to finding a cheaper place.
4 – Contact an English-language school in the city
A huge number of the people who are looking for and renting these cheaper serviced apartments are English teachers who are going someplace for one or two terms. If you are part of this group then you might already have resources waiting for you because these schools that hire foreigners know they have to help the teachers find affordable housing in order for the deal to work.
But even if you aren’t a traveling English teacher you might still get help through a school. Search for English language schools in that city (assuming you are going somewhere that English isn’t the first language) and send them a short email asking if they are aware of cheaper short-term rentals. Some schools have housing themselves for their teachers, but most don’t, and if you ask nicely you might find the best deal possible through them.