Finding an Apartment

Finding an apartment when you're not living in the city is difficult. Before I arrived in Budapest I'd found a few websites (listed at the end of this post) offering apartments for rent, from about 250 euros + bills, and there were lots of nice pictures on the websites, but don't be fooled - I've come to realise that the agencies are very good at taking good pictures. After e-mailing some of the agencies I decided that the best way to find an apartment would be to actually be in the city so that I could see the apartments and then decide - it was a wise decision. When I viewed some of the apartments, a lot of them looked nothing like the pictures, which were obviously taken when the apartments had been refurnished and cleaned.

I decided to just go to Budapest and stay in a hostel while I viewed some apartments, so I had a look for hostels on www.hostelworld.com (which is great btw - I've found the reviews really helpful in finding good hostels, and more importantly avoiding the bad ones) . I booked into the Good Morning Budapest Hostel, on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky utca, which had good reviews and was well located. From the reviews there are lots of good hostels in Budapest, Njoy Hostel is one of them, but GMB Hostel was great - the staff were really friendly and helpful and on Thursdays and Sundays they make traditional Hungarian dishes, which was a nice touch - I can really recommend it.

Anyway, staying at the hostel gave me some time to look at different apartments, and so here are some tips/advice:

1. If you're staying for less than a year, then some agencies will charge you a bit more (around 20%) was what one agency told me.

2. It's quite a competitive market, so agents are prepared to negotiate - one agent was prepared to drop the price by about 20 euros a month (but the apartment was a mess, so I didn't take it).

3. Location, location, location - make sure your apartment has a good tram or metro station nearby, otherwise it's going to be a long walk home after a night out. Also, you should check when the tram/metro stops running, because in some places they stop at midnight.

4. Also, think about the district you'll be staying in, because some of them are nicer than others. For instance, there are some nice places in the 8th district, however I looked at an apartment that was in the dodgy part - I wasn't too keen on living there. You can find a guide to the districts here.

5. It's also an idea to think about where you'll be studying and how you'll get there.

6. The deposit is usually two months rent, which you'll probably have to give (along with a months rent) when you sign the contract.

Great place, just expensive :-(

Overall, it's important to give yourself time to find an apartment. I only had a week before I started, and I was quite lucky to find somewhere nice - I'd allow at least two weeks, maybe three. You might be lucky and find a good apartment the first day, but I looked at about 15 apartments before I found the right one. Some of the others were nice, but they were either too expensive or just didn't feel right - some of them were absolutely terrible. One of them looked great in the pictures, however, when I went to view it parts of the ceiling had fallen on the floor and there were flies everywhere, circling the rotting food, the handle to a cupboard even came off in my hand! The agent was very embarrassed.

Rotting food and flies

That's the most important stuff ... I don't think I've missed anything, but if you've any questions you're welcome to write to me.

Just some of the rental websites for Budapest:

Budapest Property Solutions
I went with them in the end - they've been really helpful.

Tower Property Group
Helpful and some nice apartments, but a bit expensive. [Update 8/1/15: Have heard of a problem with them - see comment below]

Apartments of Budapest
This is really just a website where people can advertise there apartments, it's quite useful though.

Budapest Rent
The website gives a good impression, but I found that most of the apartments were already rented - it just seemed to be a list of ALL their apartments. So it wasn't particular helpful, but maybe you'll have better luck.