lägenheter

which means "apartments" in Swedish. I started looking for a place to live. I'm staying at the House of a Thousand Wows until I find one. One "wow" is that Laura and Jacob are letting me do that. Yesterday (Monday), after I went by the tax office to request a personnummer, I went to Boplats Göteborg. They mostly deal in 1st hand rental contracts. There are 1st hand and 2nd hand rental contracts, and I won't go into the details now.

I registered on their web site and searched for the type of place I wanted (center of town, around 60 sq meters, <$1200/month). There were 4 hits. One was for people 55 or over so 3 real hits. I couldn't figure out what a column was in the results table so I asked. It was the number of people who have expressed interest in a given apartment. The one that looked the most interesting to me had almost 4,000 people interested in it.

Yes, 4 thousand. What's the point then of being one more in that crowd? The woman there at the office said that was not unusual. I had heard that getting a rental place in Gbg was hard, but that was incredible. Jacob enlightened me somewhat. Places here are rent controlled, based mostly on living area. That keeps the prices down, but means that a lot of people want what places are available.

It's easier to buy a place here then it is to rent. Yesterday evening I started looking for an apartment to buy. This follows the pattern I did in Santa Fe, where I looked at a few rental places and decided to buy a house instead. Proved to be a good decision.

The web sites for apartment rentals are very bad. They are cumbersome and hard to use. By comparison, the ones for buying are wonderful. Of course, there's more profit for the real estate people, but I think also that because so many people want to rent a place they are willing to put a lot of time in to go through a bad user interface.

One of the things I learned in doing the research to buy here is that another reason to buy instead of rent is the tax discount. That's like in the US too, but I didn't know how things were structured here.

I'm looking for a bostadsrätt apartment. "Bo" = "live", "bostad" = "place to live", "rätt" = "right". Apartment buildings here can be structured (are often? are always?) structured as a co-op. That's rare in the US outside of New York City. Looking at Wikipedia there are differences between a bostadsrättförening and a housing co-op. I know the Swedish system better.

The building is owned by the association ("förening"), which is basically a non-profit. The people who live in the apartment own shares in the association. These are voting shares, and not ownership shares. Jacob says that means the value of the building is therefore not included as part of your personal wealth. Important in a country that until recently had a weath tax in addition to income tax. A member gets the right to live in one of the apartments. (Hence the term "bostadsrätt".)

How will Lesley figure out my taxes? How will I figure out my Swedish taxes? Good thing I've been careful not to mingle personal and business accounts. Still, I'll need two accountants for the indefinite future too.

Going back to the apartment search. I went online and found about 20 that were in the rough area I wanted, of the right size, etc. The price for an apartment like I want goes for about $250,000. That's a 1bd apartment (here called "2 r.o.k" meaning "2 rooms and a kitchen"), or possibly a 2. There's a tradeoff between having a larger living room, which can be converted into a dance floor, vs. having a smaller bedroom for a home office. Still debating that in my head.

After going through the options I picked the ones with showings today. There were three I was interested in. All three were nice inside. One was in Guldheden, which is right above Chalmers. It's atop the hill and has a great view overlooking the city. But it's uphill and a bit far from the places I want to be.

The second was in Linnéstan (the Linné part of town, named after Linnaeus). Great section of town; close to lots of restaurant, bars, shops, and more. The wallpaper wasn't my choice of patterns but otherwise nice. Bedroom was airy and sunny, what with two windows. Handy in the winter I imagine.

The third was in Masthugget. It's very close to Oceanen, which is where I got tango and salsa dancing. Across the street is a grocery store, and on the other side of that is the tram stop for 3 different tram lines, all going into town. The apartment was on the top floor, which gave me a problem. It has a nice balcony, but there's nothing between it and the ground far below. It's enough to trigger my fear of heights. I could bear it, but wouldn't enjoy it. Great views though.

All three had many other visitors while I was there, with the last being the most popular. I'm estimating that any one place in the areas I'm looking will have 40-50 people viewing it. Some subset will bid on the place. If more than one then there's a bidding contest. Usually places here go within a week or two.

Heikki's house in the UK, in a small town south of Cambridge, was on the market for over a year. My house in Santa Fe was on the market for a couple of months.

I won't have a personnumber/tax id for another few days. Once I have that I can open a bank account. I'll also be talking with the bank (I don't think there are mortgage companies here) about getting a loan, and what my options are. I've got money from selling my house in the US, which will make for a good down payment. I'm told normal is 10% down but I'ld rather do higher as I've got the money and I think real estate here is likely to be a good investment.