The Man Sheep of Experience

After several months of living in the posh luxury and breathtaking scenery of the company apartment, the time has come for me to start looking for a place of my own. From talking to people about it over the past few months and reading a bit about the process, I get the impression that apartment hunting here in Stockholm is so difficult that the government is considering nominating it as a demonstration sport for the next Olympics.

For starters, the pricing is really screwed up. In the States, the drill goes more or less like this:

1. Seller lists a house for $X;
2. Bidder likes the house and offers something like $X-10,000;
3. After months of haggling, termite inspections, and the execution of several mysterious financial instruments with names like "Tax-Exempt Municipal Leveraged Capitalization Escrow," the two parties settle on a price that is somewhere in between.
   

Here in Sweden, on the other hand, it works a little differently:

1. Seller lists a house for some ridiculously small price, say 500 SEK. Typically this price will not have any relation whatsoever to the amount they're hoping to actually receive. It might be on par with the cost of a week's groceries.
2. Seller hires an unindicted co-conspiratorbroker to list the place and set up an "open house," which is Swedish for "Hey, Roaming Hordes of Desperate Apartmentless People Whose Sublets Are About To Expire! Come look at my apartment on Sunday! (But please take off your muddy shoes and leave them in the hall for the neighbors to trip over.) "
3. Aforementioned radioactive weaselbroker sets up the open house for Sunday, from 13.00 until 13.15. No, that's not a mis-print. Furthermore, all brokers have their showings on Sundays, and they all have them at the same time. It must be some sort of wack-ass Broker Conspiracy Rule, as it ensures that you will not be able to see more than two apartments on any given day. You have to declare your loyalties early.
   
4. Aforementioned People stop by the place on Sunday and, if they are interested, so indicate to the aforementioned puppy abuserbroker.
   
5. The following day, aforementioned miserable, vomitous massbroker begins calling the list of people who expressed interest and soliciting bids. If and when someone bids high enough to satisfy the seller, and no other party is willing to bid more, the transaction continues with bank loans, paperwork, and the like. In short, this is a good old-fashioned auction, in which the final sale price is guaranteed to be significantly higher than the initial asking price. Twenty or thirty percent is typical; seventy-five percent is not unheard of for particularly desirable places.
   

Think about this for a minute. In the States, there is usually at least some mechanism to balance the interests of the two parties involved: the sellers and their brokers can agree on whatever (mis-)representations they think they can get away with, but you can generally request an independent assessment of the home's value. So there's a balance. Whereas here in Sweden, the broker completely controls the bidding process, while having a direct interest in seeing that the place sells for the highest price possible (thus maximizing his commission). So the broker might call the following day and say, "Hej! Bidding has been brisk on this one, ja! Is now up to the Gross National Product of Ecuador. You are still interested?" Of course, there is an art to playing this game, but the point is that as I understand it currently, I have very little leverage in the process other than to say "no" if the price gets too high.

As you can imagine, this post may well be the first in a series of increasingly hilarious accounts (hilarious for the real estate brokers, not me) about my escapades in trying to find a place. So I won't dwell on the struggles until I actually have some. However, I can't resist quoting a paragraph I recently saw on the website of one of the main housing brokerages here in Stockholm, as presented in the inimitable poetic stylings of my favorite web-based translation engine:

Another necessary knowledge is the man sheep of experience. We have sold apartments in almost each house on Söder and in each söderförort. Therefore, we have a hum about what the should cost.

Yeah.

I imagine they might be humming Wagner. I wish they would go have a hum somewhere else.

I just want to find a damn apartment.