Apartment found in Beijing

Today Diana signed the papers for our first apartment in Beijing, China. This confirms that for the next year we will be living in Beijing and, thus, learning Mandarin Chinese. Beijing is being overrun by Olympic fever so our apartment search was made rather difficult by landlords that are looking to "cash-in" on the once-in-a-lifetime event. Almost every single one of the apartments we looked at, that matched our picky criteria, had the rent raised either just before or during our viewing of it.

After searching for a good three weeks I gave up one day. I just had to get away from it and I needed to catch up on the other parts of my life. So while I emailed, studied and did some "work" Diana continued the tireless search. She braved the cold weather and the howling winds of Beijing and just when she thought all was lost she found it. She went into "one last" agent and asked if anything was available with our picky criteria (it's not super picky, it's just western criteria in an eastern country... ok it's picky). They had a place.

The apartment was in a brand new building in the 和平里 (he ping le) area just off the brand new 5 subway line. Of course we have both been fed the "brand new" line before and it usually means "Super old building with some new-ish type furniture that may or may not have been cleaned in the past year". This apartment was different. The apartment was so new it had yet to be lived in! She looked at it, loved it and made an appointment so I could see it.

I looked at it the next day and I had to say that "she done good". The place was cool so we went ahead with the negotiations.

Jumping straight to the point it took 5 days to get to the meeting we had today. First we had to negotiate the price down to a reasonable amount and then we had issues about appliances, furniture, etc. It took time but in the end it was worth it.

I rented the apartment in NYC so now it was Diana's turn. She rented the apartment in her name. I think it's appropriate because she did all of the work. Incidentally this is Diana's first apartment that she has a signed a contract as a sole person (i.e. I'm not on the lease). I think it's cool that she did it in a foreign country while speaking a foreign language. That's much cooler than my first dumpy apartment in Olympia, Washington.

Things are done a bit differently in China than in the U.S. Primarily that the method of payment is cold hard cash paid on the spot. To this meeting we carried over 16,000 RMB in cash with us. To put that in perspective it's over $2,000 USD (at the time of writing) or approximately two months salary for an average Beijing IT employee (it's the sector I know). It's highly customary to pay rent 3 months in advance and, on initial signing, one month rent as a deposit. Whew! That's a big chunk of change. Double, triple and quadrupled counted by two parties in two different languages.

With the amount of cold hard cash I felt as though we should have swapped briefcases under a dark secluded bridge and used pseudo-names like "Bigem" or "Swetch".

After we handed over the cash we got the key!! It's official. A lease is signed, keys handed over and we're registered at the local police station. We're here to stay!

This post does make it sound as if the process were easy. The honest truth about renting an apartment in Beijing is that the housing market is absolutely awesome.

Apartments are everywhere and at every part of the spectrum in terms of price, quality, furnishing, etc. The key to all of it is that you NEED to speak Chinese. Let me repeat this. You NEED to speak Chinese. If you don't you're a paying a "foreigner" tax. It's the hard honest truth. In fact even if you do speak the language you may still pay that foreigner tax.

When things came down to it Diana and I fully admitted to each other (and now to the world) that we paid (1) foreigner tax (2) Olympic tax and (3) convenience tax. We're foreigners and we tried really, really hard to avoid this "foreigner tax"; which, of course, isn't a real tax it's just the fact that you're only seeing higher priced apartments because of your inability to communicate and/or read the, much cheaper, Chinese postings. We found many, many, many cheaper postings on sina.com.cn (and other sites) but our Chinese just wasn't strong enough to really go direct on these websites. We simply felt more comfortable using an agent (one of the sources of the "tax"). A good agent, like we found, worked for us regardless of the language barrier. We used 我爱我家 and I'd recommend them (expensive but worth it for foreigners).

Olympic tax is hard to avoid these days. Every landlord in town knows the Olympic Games are coming and they are either (a) only signing leases until July so that they can jack up, make that hyper jack up, the rents for the events or (b) raising the rents for the entire year. Again we tried to avoid it and I do think we are missing the full brunt of it but we did pay some Olympic tax.

The final tax was a convenience tax. To be honest we were just tired of looking. The place wasn't 100% perfect. The fridge sucks and it should be replaced. We wanted the landlord to do more but in the end we got most of our requests taken care of and we gave up on the rest. You can only fight for so long. The place is "fine" not perfect but fine. After all it's just a house and we just want to live in peace now. We could have looked for another two weeks and we probably would have found a cheaper place with better furnishings and better... well we could have found something better. In the end we just said "Whatever... lets just live, it's only money and life is more than money". This isn't to say we're throwing money away just that we value living our lives over saving a hundred or so RMB.

The view from our bedroom is awesome! We can see the new CCTV being built as well as a good cross section of town. I'm hoping to make friends with the security guards so they can grant me access to the roof. It is an absolutely amazing view up there!

Now we have a home! We move in tomorrow and we're hoping to have our ADSL hooked up by mid next week (or tomorrow if I'm really, really, really lucky). Our next challenge is to decipher what the heck this notice is. I just hope it's not about shutting off the heat, or a building bankruptcy notice ;)

After that I just want to have a nice hotpot meal at home with some really nice Chinese friends whom we are indebted to.

The adventure continues!