Flat Hunting: Craigslist or Dumpling Stand?

6-10 September 2010

Flat Hunting: Craigslist or Dumpling Stand?

Monday morning, Xiaomei took me to see two flats. One was a very nice single but was way out of my price range. The second was a potential fit --- a three or four bedroom depending on potential roommates. It's 18000 RMB for "four" bedrooms. The problem is the "fourth" bedroom is really more of a study, but we could put a twin bed in there. On the other hand, it has a huge common area with great furnishings and a kitchen several times bigger than any others I’ve seen in Shanghai. It has an amazing location though, near Weihai and Shimen Road, which is near the Four Seasons and a very convenient metro stop.

Then with my pals from IESE I saw another potential flat I could live in with two IESE guys. It is technically in the Jingan Temple area, but it seemed a bit far West. Entering it was just like in Coming to America, when they are staying in the decaying apartment building in Queens but Arsenio Hall remodels their own apartment luxuriously in great relief to the building itself. The building was not an expat building like most we had seen; there were notices in Mandarin covering the bulletin board and elevator walls, and we only spotted Chinese neighbors, which I think would be a plus. It's only 10000 RMB with three real bedrooms, but I remained a bit worried about the location. The owners also stopped my potential flatmate Gerald on the street after we had seen it with an agent and suggested we make a deal without the agent. Maybe devious, maybe money-saving, but in this unfamiliar world, I said I’d prefer to have an agent, who would be our only hope of an ally if any problems came up with the landlord.

Another place Gerald and I saw was near People’s Square Metro and had amazing views and a particularly amazing landlord. He appeared at the door in his boxer shorts and gave us enthusiastic insights in loud Chinese about the apartment - its rooms, the views, the neighborhood – as we walked around.

We walked into one bedroom, and I said, “We found his pants.” They were laid out on the dresser.

The problem with the Tasmanian landlord was that the rental term was one-year, and that was non-negotiable. The agent the IESE guys had found said it was very normal to leave after four months and just forfeit the deposit as the penalty. I wasn’t comfortable with this, whether as a real estate professional, a karmic consideration, a moral question, or lack of experience with the Chinese way. I wasn’t going to sign a one-year lease when I knew I wasn’t staying.

The next day we saw a five-bedroom flat near Jiangsu metro stop, which is on the preferred Line 2 but one stop further west than I am hoping to live. The potential roommates would be two friends from IESE and two new friends from ESADE, which is another business school in Barcelona. The apartment complex had tons of amenities, though all of them had fees for each use. They spanned from a swimming pool and work out facility to a pool hall and a mahjongg parlor. The place also had an amazing den, almost a man-room, with a huge flatscreen TV, several large leather couches, a massage table, and an extra refrigerator by the sideboard bar. Gerald and Hendrik adored it and wanted to move in. I was only dubious about the location. It also seemed a little grimy because it was not cleaned for new tenants yet. As with many flats we saw, there was an inexplicably large number of Chinese people there for the real estate showing. They all sat around watching us check the place out.

At any rate, the guys loved it, and I thought it would be fun to live with a big crew since it’s only for a semester and we’ll all be travelling a lot. The price was also right: 15,000 RMB for five people, though one room was again very small and would need a discount. So we settled on it and started to talk details with our agent, who in turn discussed them with the landlord and her large entourage.

That night Gerald and I went for dumplings in a rather chipper mood. It felt good to know we had found a place after all that looking. I still wasn’t in love with the location because the surrounding area was relatively unappealing as far as restaurants, businesses, and the like, and yet I was very pleased because it was a short-term rental contract at a good price and, most importantly, because I was excited about the group of roommates.

At the dumpling stand, I was struggling to remember the Chinese word for 8, and a bystander provided it. In the few words he said in English, I caught the sound of home and asked where he was from.

“Tennessee. Where are you from?”

“Tennessee.”

His name was Chris. We started chatting, and we mentioned that flat hunting was about all we had done since arriving. He told us he and his flatmate were actually looking for subletters for their lease, which expires on Christmas Eve. Their flat was right next to Jingan Temple Station (my most preferred metro stop) and 8000 RMB per month for two bedrooms. He said that around his flat there was a perfect mix of expat venues and Chinese hole-in-the-walls. This was too good to be true! Except that I had just committed to the five-bedroom next to Jiangsu Station. We got his number anyway and said we could get the word out to some other exchange students. He also said he would suggest some places for us to go in Shanghai.

This is when the catches started on the five-bedroom. First of all, they wanted a deposit of two months of rent for a four month rental contract. I did not trust this agent to any degree and particularly thought she seemed extremely closely tied to the landlord, though I don’t know in what capacity. Also, I have a friend who was here last year and, for no arguable reason, was not given his deposit back, only finally getting one-half of it back after much effort and the help of his agent. Therefore I did not see the deposit as something we were likely to see again in this case, especially with the Chinese propensity to renegotiate as one goes along. I took note that, if we considered the deposit lost, the net rental price would be 4500 per month per person, which was the same cost as the nicest flat I had seen so far. For that much I preferred to live smack dab in the middle of town. (Granted, all of these rents are far less than they would be in Barcelona.)

As negotiations went on, this became a sticking point and, to make a long story short, it killed the deal for me. (In the end, some other friends kept negotiating on some other points, and the terms changed several times in other ways, not to mention the problem that it finally came out that a Taiwanese golfer was a current tenant and not leaving for a few weeks.)

That’s when I resorted to the dumpling stand-turned-Craigslist opportunity and called Chris. Gerald and I went to see the flat, which was on Yan’an Zhong Lu, and you could see the Jing’an Temple Metro Station sign from the window by the elevator. The flat didn’t have any crazy amenities but was exactly what it needed to be: short term lease, no deposit (!!), large common area with a big TV, a couch, and a dining room table, a reasonably functional kitchen, and location, location, location. Not to mention that there was no agency fee but as virtual agents, we had the two Chris’s, a Tennessean and a Texan who spoke reasonable-to-good Mandarin and could remain middlemen with the landlady. I was sold.

So, that’s the story of how Gerald and I found our fantastic flat through the Tennessean I met at the dumpling stand. I moved in the next day, on Friday, 10 September, the same day I needed to give up my room at the Rayfont Hotel.

Pictured: 1003 Yan'an Zhong Lu: the den, my bedroom, and the view out the window next to the elevator