This is our first joint blog post. This way we can be sure not to miss any interesting information.

Having successfully moved to Sweden, we are often asked to share our experience on how we moved here. We believe that our blog is a good place for sharing (and hopefully also exchanging) this type of information and experiences.

Our account is based on our specific case and is not meant to be comprehensive in any way. That is we can only share the experience of an EU citizen accompanied with a non-EU family spouse, who possesses a long term residency permit in another EU country.

Some information will necessarily be Stockholm specific, while other will apply wherever you choose to land in Sweden. The four challenges that we will tackle in four different posts are:

• Finding a house
• Paperwork
• Learning Swedish
• Job hunting

Finding a house

We heard and read many horror stories about the specificities and challenges of renting an apartment in Stockholm and we were prepared for the worst. Fortunately, with some divine help / luck and some linguistic mediation from a friend of ours, we managed to find the right apartment for us in less than a week, and after one year we are still living there (touch wood!). Here goes the story:

Once we informed a Swedish friend of ours (who lives in Stockholm) that we were planning to move, she sent us some links to websites where people offer apartments for rent. The ones worth mentioning are:

• Bostadirekt: this is a well known “second hand” rent website, and where we found our apartment.
• Blocket: think “eBay” but with a Swedish flavour.
• The forums on The Local:  “The Local” is an online newspaper in English featuring news from Sweden.

On the other hand, we definitively discourage you from using craiglist, on which we only found scams.

Amongst the “good sites” we found that bostaddirekt had a number of interesting options, so we booked a ticket to Stockholm to make an exploratory trip (none of us had previously been to Stockholm and it seemed a good idea to at least check the city before to move!).

Once arrived, we paid the subscription fee for bostaddirekt (at the time of writing about 70 euros for 45 days of access to their database) and we started contacting apartment owners by email. This proved to be an ineffective strategy, as by the time the landlord/landlady would check their e-mail, somebody else would have already arranged the deal via telephone. To be honest, we also suspected that some of the owners would give precedence to Swedish or Swedish-speaking tenants: we have no evidence for our allegations, but a recent study by Metro confirms that it is 4 times harder for a migrant [in comparison to a Swede] to close the deal for renting a house.

Maybe we were right, or maybe it was just by sheer coincidence, but when we ask I. to call and arrange for us a visit to one of the apartments, we were for the first time not turned down. On the contrary, we met the owners, we liked each other and we closed the deal in just a few hours.

After exchanging our experiences with other people who moved to Stockholm (both foreigners and Swedes from other cities), we heard different stories and here are a few points you need to consider when you are hunting for a flat in Stockholm.

The first concept you should get accustomed with is that of first hand vs. second hand contracts. A first hand contract means that you rent an apartment from the owner directly. A second hand contract means that you are rening the flat from a first hand tenant who sublet it (which is – just to be clear – a fully legal practice in Sweden, unless explicitly stated otherwise on the first hand contract).

Obviously a first hand rent is best, since it gives a tenant many more rights. Most importantly, most of the second hand apartments are available only for short periods of time (1 to 12 months). Because of historical reasons, in Stockholm second hand contracts are much more common than first hand ones, so even Swedish people tend to keep moving around for years or stand in rental lines forever until they get a first hand contract.

Additionally, there is a shortage of rental flats in Stockholm and flat owners are perfectly aware of that. You have to bear in mind that there are many people out there looking out for opportunities to rent or improve their rental situation: so you definitively need to act quickly if you think a given offer is of interest to you; if you are the kind of person who likes to think over stuff, you might find that by the time you have made your decision, the flat has long gone.

The downside to the need of acting quickly is that this makes easier for tricksters to cheat people, so never pay a krona until you meet and – above all – see the apartment with your own eyes.

As a foreigner, you are not really the first choice as a tenant. We guess it’s more or less the same in all countries: locals feel reassured when dealing with a compatriot and it is easier for them to trust somebody they can communicate well with. It also depends a lot on your nationality though, with westerners having a much easier time than, for example, people from Africa or South America. This is why it is advisable to get some mediation from a Swedish acquaintance, who can also be your reference.

The area of the city where the apartment is located is a very decisive factor both for the price and for the amount of competition you will have to face . There is a very sharp distinction between förort (suburbs) and centrum (city center), but even more between different områden (districts) of the city. Swedes tend to prefer certain areas (and they have a very strict list), while specific areas are considered more as “foreigner enclaves”. Price and availability of owners to rent out to foreigners will vary accordingly. On the positive side of things: Stockholm has a very efficient transport system, so living in a förort does not mean being cut out from the busy life of the city centre.

[On to section 2: paperwork (legal procedures for settling in Sweden)]