China, How it is - Renting an Apartment

hey there guys welcome to another episode of China how it is this is going to be a very special episode the reason why I say special is it's going to actually be very useful now if I had seen a video like this before I came to China it would have saved me a world of trouble and I'll tell you why now I was unaware that even as a tourist you can rent an apartment in China you don't need to really have any special status if you are here on a tourist or business visa anything like that you can rent an apartment now because I didn't know this for the first three months that I was in China I actually stayed in hotels and this basically ate away all of my money all my savings and it got me into a hole at a bad situation which is something I'm going to of course tell you all about in my surviving Chen Jien series anyway without further ado let's rewind three months and begin this good morning everybody I've had a lot of questions about renting apartments in China and well I have an opportunity to show you all how it's done si um well just like in every country you have to be pretty careful when you choose your landlord difference is of course that for instance in the UK or America there's certain binding laws and agreements that you you know come along with your rental contract however in China not so much for instance for the past week every night have had real estate agents knocking on the door ringing the doorbell trying to come in to show people around now there was no warning I wasn't given notification the landlady didn't send me a message give me a call anything like that they just started pitching up so of course I refused them entry but they just continually bother me and I found the landlady and I told her listen um I understand you obviously want to sell the house or whatever you want to do that's fine make an appointment with me and then you can come through don't just you know keep showing up in it they turn up late as well like sort of 8 to 9 10 o'clock at night um so she said fine she wouldn't you know should tell them to stop coming but they did still come every night and then last night by the way I did make an arrangement with her I said Thursday night which is tonight I said Thursday night you can come bring people to take a look you know cuz I'll be at home I wasn't at home the previous night's beer girl was there by yourself so um it's Thursday night tonight but last night she came to the door um good morning to come in I wasn't home still she found me she demanded to come in she said she's already sold the place and she wants to you know show the new owner you know property here in China's just a joke it's like a big Monopoly games like a investment thing anyway so I told her to bugger off in the nicest terms actually I wasn't very nice I was quite tired of her and I told her she can come tonight after like many phone calls lots of arguing trying to trick a beer girl into letting her in by saying it was only her in that and another woman but meanwhile they were like four or six people outside and and even when they phoned me I spoke to some guys you know I decided screw this apartment I never liked the landlady I only moved in here because there was a rush you know the previous owner had sold at the end of my contract came up he had already sold the place so I had to move I'd like something like two weeks to to move and this was just two buildings over it was convenient I didn't like the landlady she's a terrible person but you know desperation drives a hard bargain so I signed and moved in now I'm only a couple months into my rental agreement of the Year Agreement probably about five months now I think and I've just decided I need to move so come along with me we're going to go to a local little estate agent here in this area because you always go to the estate agents in the area you want to go and live in going to go there and take a look around see if we can find a better apartment okay now you might be wondering what does an estate agent in China look like well there really very easy to identify because they all look very similar I will put the characters for estate agent up on the screen for you now so that you can see exactly what an estate agent what the writing looks like but you can always just look at the windows they always have usually a4 sheets showing you the amounts for rent or to buy and they all look the same so you really you know it's an estate agent and now the thing is it's just crazy the amount of estate agents that you actually get in China anywhere you go so in order to demonstrate this to you I decided I would quickly hop on my bike and just drive around my area and I would decided I would keep it within a square kilometer and see how many estate agents I could spot so this is what I'm doing now every time I'm pointing at a building here or a shop sorry this is in fact an estate agent so you can see just within this very very small area around my house just how many estate agents there actually are okay so what's happening here is I went to I previously passed by told the guys I was looking for a new apartment so they were waiting there for me I took beer girl alone so that she could come with me to see the new apartments of course hmm so we went there they were waiting for us and what you see now is they basically got the keys to a couple of houses in the complex and they're walking us to the houses to show us what they look like now it's very important as a foreigner for you to use an estate agent I know that it is possible to strike private deals with owners to get houses but the reason why you should always go through an estate agent is well it actually has something to do with your residence permit your temporary residence permit now I've mentioned this before in my visa video but all foreigners do actually need to be registered at their local police station a lot of people don't do it some people aren't even aware of it but it is a requirement by law and if you want to apply for anything such as a bank account these days or if you need to apply for a visa a work visa or anything like this you you do need your temporary residence permit now the reason why you need to use an agent is when you apply for your temporary residence permit at the local police station you will need a piece of paper well you will need your rental contract sorry and it needs to be stamped with an official stamp from a real estate agent and that is the reason why you should use an agent as a foreigner so you can get that document now this is the first apartment that they took us to it has potential you know I specified of course to them that I wanted an apartment without furniture because I have a lot of furniture already since the last two apartments have stayed in I got unfurnished so I you know built up a huge collection of furniture so a nice thing about a non furnished place of course is that the rent is cheaper and you don't need to worry about breaking anybody's things anyway first apartment wasn't that great we did look at a couple of others which I have not uploaded the foot wall so I had actually lost the footage we then moved on to this next apartment and immediately I I saw potential so it was more or less decided that this would be our new apartment here all right so they're just off to make a photocopy of my passport and according to them I can move in on the 15th they're going to clean the place up there is some furniture that belongs to the landlord's friend that he was going to come and fetch it at some point I like here you can see on the outside they have the prices for buying places around here keep in mind that this is a very you know this is very low cost compared to like in the inner city areas so you can see their rental per month see it is like it's got a slash and then it's got the character for month year two thousand three hundred a month four thousand a month yeah two thousand six hundred and it tells you how many square meters see like there tisha ping me you know 70 square meters sixty-six square meters eighty-nine square meters etc this is all stuff for sale that's telling you how much it's going to cost per meter square these matter ah Susan young I said just made a copy of my passport here soon we'll be signing the contract is a contract is busy being written up over there they tell you something about the current contract what we've but we're stipulating in the new contract is that during our rental agreement period the landlord is not allowed to send people to come and look at the house because this is this has been the big problem that I've had living in this area now I didn't have this problem when I was living in Fujian in the you know in the city centre because it's more developed there you know people buy a place it's a it's a big investment it's a lot more expensive to buy a place so you know they buy and they tend to hold on to it but out here because housing prices are a lot cheaper and it's always developing and changing they buy them relatively cheap in fact they buy them very cheap and then the price goes up very quickly so you know it's seen as a big investment opportunity so as soon as the price sort of goes up a certain amount they just want to sell it's like playing a game of Monopoly or something so this is the reason why basically the first place that I that I moved into the one with the big nice balcony I moved in just as the landlord had bought it and a year later at the end of the contract he's he had sold it and now the same with this one I moved in six months into my contract she sold it so it's very frustrating now what's most frustrating is you know they kind of put it on the market when I feel like it's worth more and then people come and look it's like a show house you know people come and knock on your door all the time so in order to avoid this situation from occurring basically what we've done is get got them to write into the contract that nobody can come and bother us or come and see the house while we are living there doing rental period all right so just drawing some deposit money it's going to cost uh 6600 us what is it yeah at 6600 for the whole lot its including T month's rent and the agents fee it's not bad I've paid as much as like thirteen and a half in the past depending on the department together so here's a proper look at the place we're renting come in this has got a fairly nice living room I mean it's big enough the best part of course is the view of the lake that we have here from the balcony is very nice you know what else do we have over here yeah two bedrooms they've out not huge but they're big enough they're nice enough so yeah bedroom number one bedroom number two and the kitchen is pretty vile but we will fix that has a little loan we've already got a hot water thing I've got one too here we have a little laundry area which is quite nice a washing machine and crap can be out of the way yeah it's unfortunate about the kitchen it's not very nice but let's sort something out yep that's it really cool so it's been about three months since I took those videos I'm now completely settled in to this new place it's great I brief it at the kitchen it's fully furnished I would like to show you but it's in a little little bit of a mess I had a couple of drinks some friends over and whatnot and I think beer girl would kill me a fire yeah show the mess online so I don't think I'll do that anyway oh is that saying here's a brief it at the kitchen it looks great I had to replace the toilet because it had a squat toilet now it's kind of odd most of the apartments that we saw had western-style toilets but this one had a squat toilet that it's not a big deal it was really cheap I just went and bought a you know i okayed it with the landlord of course but I went and bought a western-style toilet cost me 850 RMB to buy the toilet and have it installed so you know cheap and it's great so that's sorted here's the advice no estate agent that I've ever been to in China can speak English okay those guys in the video couldn't speak a word of English not even like anything more than hello now my Chinese is good enough that I can deal with this myself and I have in the past but you know you're going to have to get somebody to translate for you so whoever it is a friend a supplier you know an assistant to whoever you're dealing with here in China try and get them to come with you and help you sort this out in fact you're going to need to have an english-speaking person because all the contracts are in Chinese they don't have English so you know you need to get somebody to translate it for you so you can make sure you're not signing your life away or something like that not that the contracts are really very binding mind you you know very easy to just you know tear them up throw them away anyone that's China but you're going to need someone to obviously check the document the documents for you are you're going to need somebody to translate for you because you know they are just not going to be able to speak English so that's a very important thing bring someone who can speak English and Chinese with you okay let me break down the costs for you okay this apartment because it's out hearing bujji which is outside of the main city center it's a lot cheaper than living in the city center so it's a two and a half and also 2,200 RMB a month to rent here just remember it's unfurnished and you know out of the main city center that's why it's that price for an apartment of this size inside Chen Jien you probably pay something like six thousand a month in a good area and maybe as little as four and a half in a not so good area okay so what else agents fees the agents fee was was two thousand two hundred which is also a single month's rent basically I think they work out their agents fee on a percentage depending on the rent something like that every single time that I've done this I've paid around about two thousand room and B for the agents fee so just bear that in mind but make them work for it you know it's like if you have problems go to them and ask them to deal with the landlord for you for instance okay my estate agents they know me really well there they're a pretty good bunch so that they're pretty helpful and you know they've set it up so that I can just go and pay them because they're right here in my little complex so I can actually just go pay them the rent every month I don't need to do bank transfers and stuff which can be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes so um yep that's pretty much it I hope you found this useful so guys that's it from me for now and I'm looking forward to seeing all of you in my next video Cheers

Channel: serpentza

Views: 213,801

Rating: 4.8992496 out of 5

Keywords: China, Adventure, Bikes, Beer, Apartment, Rent, Flat, Condominium, landlord, landlady, deposit, real estate, estate agent, house hunting, How it is, China how it is, Let, Letting

Id: rBtTMHO2X7A

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2013