Day 901: Flat Hunting

I'm packing my bag and movin' on down to the big (er, moderately sized by European standards) city of Stockholm!

But before I can do that, there's a lot of flat hunting to be done.

I've never been in a position to buy any kind of property in London and I probably never will (I was going to do a bunch of research and give some interesting statistics about how many people own homes in London and how much it costs but I started reading and got too angry and depressed so I stopped.) Essentially what I'm writing here is not a comparison of English and Swedish life because I don't have a point of comparison having never owned anything in England. Instead it's a look at the quirks of browsing the Swedish home market.

For the past few weekends, and even some weekdays too, I've been looking at flats with my sambo to get a feel for what kinds of flats are on the market, how much stuff costs, which areas we actually want to live in and which areas suck sweaty, dirty balls.

Pretty much any house worth its bricks is listed on a website called Hemnet which, in typical Swedish fashion, also has a well made app on which you can draw the areas you want to search with a virtual pencil.

I get the impression that many Swedish people browse Hemnet and view flats just for the fun of it, after all it's SUCH a fun weekend activity for godawful couples with nothing better to do that ranks up there with "going round Ikea" and "checking out the high street". Hemnet sometimes gets over 2.5 million views a week, which is frankly astounding for a country with only 9.5 million people.

There are essentially 3 places to live in Stockholm, just like any other city; the expensive bit "inside the tolls" which extends just a bit north of the picture above, the slightly-cheaper-but-still-expensive bit just outside which has plenty of houses but not plenty of anything else, and the cheap bit with generous sizes for your money but long commutes with unreliable trains, questionable neighbours in some places and mind numbingly boring orbital towns in which the only source of entertainment is a big Willy.

No matter where you look, though, every flat has the same furniture because the seller has hired rental furniture from the estate agent, who in turn has probably done extensive research into exactly which furniture is best for driving up the price. All the houses are painted white as a backdrop for these items, I did a random search and these were the first 5 of the flats that showed up, all are white:

Apparently Scarlet Johansson's giant face sells well:

I know it's her because I viewed the flat and her face was CREEPY

as do apples:

I would browse for more spot-the-difference (or not) pictures but I just can't bear to look at flats any more than I absolutely have to. There are always candles, similar kinds of soap in the bathroom, fake fur throws on the balcony furniture, a funky coffee machine of some sort, fresh flowers, herbs and a good old HEMNES:

The whole time you're viewing, you're supposed to perform some kind of mental feat (a bit like Orwellian DoubleThink) in which you both appreciate the style of the room with the furniture in it, whilst simultaneously blanking the furniture out and replacing it with your own furniture. You have to see that the furniture and accessories exist and at the same time realise they do not exist in the house as you would have it. This, I will freely admit, is not a skill I have. I truly believe that I will have a HEMNES full of apples and posters of Scarlet Johansson when I finally live in Stockholm.

The oppressive samey-ness of the furniture, the plan layouts, the colours, the sales agents and the accents is only one part of a larger problem: the other people viewing the flats. The blandness of the flats is a symptom of the blandness of the viewers. The sales agents know what people like and give it to them. People queue up nicely, set their many shoes by the door and mill about in the hallway like so many shepherded sheep, looking at a pre-set list of values; is the wooden floor in good condition? Is the light coming from the south? How much debt does the residents association have? Is the floor layout original or have the occupants made changes? Is there a lift?

I viewed a flat last week and I really liked it. I would have bid for it, in fact. But it was not a very orthodox flat; the current owners had renovated, compromising on bedroom space to make room for an amazing kitchen with space for any conceivable size of party. The living room was not a standard square (Shock! Horror! Nightmare!) and the bathroom was not directly attached to the bedroom. Nobody was interested in this flat. There were no queues of shoes outside and no scrum of sheep inside. "Great!" I naively believed. Thinking this would mean a good price.

Actually what it means is that the flat would be very difficult to sell in the future and would not be a good investment. People don't like it because it doesn't meet their parameters of what is interesting. The absence of a lift, even in a building with just 3 floors, can wipe up to half a million Krona off the desired price for the flat on resale (another bizarre fact, given Swedish obsession with health and fitness). When starting out I really enjoyed flat hunting with my sambo and looking for that special place with a quirk just for us. I now realise that there can be no quirk, I have to conform to the ideals of the Swedish market if I want a sensible investment. And this, for me, sucks the fun out of the whole process.