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A comment on Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm. Parent comment

Re:Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm by sebcat on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @05:29AM (#19206925)
> Sweden has a major problem with housing, so you can forget renting an apartment in a major city — you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list to be able to rent anything in the centre of Gothenburg. This isn't hyperbole.

You can forget a first hand contract from the municipal housing agencies. Second hand contracts and/or private landlords still work - but watch out for scams.

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Re:Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm by mariefred on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @09:43AM (#19208149)
> you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list

last I have read it's 10 years in Stockholm, in Åkersberga (less than an hour north of Stockholm) it would be a few years https://www.armadafast.se/boende/bostadsk%C3%B6/k%C3%B6tider

or you can buy for 2M SEK (200,000 Euro) a nice small house in a suburb and pay the mortgage back over 50 years.

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Re:Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm by yakshaving_jgt on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @09:54AM (#19208234)
Yeah, it's different wait times for different areas. The 18 year figure I gave was for central Gothenburg, like I said.

Where I was living — in Majorna/Kungsladugård — on average 2,400 people applied to rent each apartment. This was back in 2012. This would be worse now, given the refugee/migrant influx.

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Re:Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm by yakshaving_jgt on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @07:28AM (#19207318)
> Second hand contracts and/or private landlords still work

Barely. There is a black market for rental contracts in Sweden, which is as far as I'm aware unheard of everywhere else in the world.

Renting "i andra hand" (subletting) is extremely difficult. Want to see how bad the market is? Put a fake apartment up for rent on Blocket to test the response rate. The last time I did this, I had over 300 responses in the first half hour.

Subletting is also time-limited to a year, if I remember correctly (though perhaps some housing associations have different rules on this, and perhaps not).

The people downvoting my original comment which is somewhat critical of Sweden is good reflection of the typical Swedish mentality — borta bra men hemma bäst. There's a reason Sweden is called "China of the North".

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