Sharing Your Apartment

As I mentioned in the post, "Where in Beijing?" I've been trying to solidify our apartment situation. Using the site mentioned in that same post (beijing.haozu.com) you have a lot of filter options in your search. One of them is to select a "Shared" apartment or to "Rent the Whole". You may wonder why anyone would want to share an apartment, but remember, this is the educational district of Beijing so there are host of students looking for cheap housing and will tolerate roommates. Being married, I was definitely in the market for an apartment all to ourselves, but even using the "Rent the Whole" option I began to get the feeling that the apartments were not completely for one family. The posts were titled "master bedroom rental" and even though it would be a two or three bedroom apartment, they only showed the picture of one bedroom. From these evidences I became convinced that the filter was bogus and that these real estate agents were putting up their apartments under random parameters.

As I selected those that I was sure would be "Rent the Whole" styled apartments, my friend Victoria Wang from Farmington, UT helped us do the translation on three-way calls with the respective brokers. Is was during one of these discussions that the broker revealed that they had another apartment available that was a three bedroom but that the owner had filled two of the rooms with personal storage items and them locked them, but that the rest of the apartment was available for rent. Victoria and I were both surprised to learn that this was really quite common amongst landlords, and that if I had found an apartment that was three bedroom with only the master bedroom available still would be reserved for only one family.

Happy day! This meant that so many more apartments from my searches were viable candidates for us to rent. However on a somber after note, we called on another apartment under all these conditions, and lo and behold, we would have to share it, so the filter of "Rent the Whole" is still bogus every once in a while.