A few weeks ago, we wrote about having secured an apartment for the next few months on a month-to-month lease while we searched for longer-term housing. This was great news after so much Airbnb and hotel hopping for the past few months!
And the 1-bedroom, 1-bath furnished apartment is certainly better than where we’ve been, but it needs to be temporary (not more than a few months), both for the landlord and for us. Plus it is more expensive than we want to pay, a premium price for a safe and clean building. We have indeed kept searching for longer-term housing, thinking it would probably take us months to find a landlord who would lease to us as Americans on travel visas with no jobs.
Searching on our own has been hard. Without solid French language skills or a required “tenant dossier” showing our worthiness as renters, the deck has been stacked against us. We’d reach out to private landlords and get no response. Also, Angers is a university town and 45,000 students descend on the town looking for apartments each August. We thought we’d probably need the entirety of our short-term lease to find our next place.
A friend of a friend recently introduced us to a professional apartment finder who spoke both English and French fluently. For a pretty reasonable fee, she helped us prepare our dossier and started reaching out to landlords on our behalf. Imagine our surprise when after just a few days, she was able to get us an appointment to look at a newer furnished house with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths for significantly less money than our current place, near the tram line in Angers that we use most often. Plus it had a full-size dishwasher and a CLOTHES DRYER!!!!!!!
We met the owner, toured the place, and long story short, were offered a one-year lease for the house. We signed it this week! We’ve got the keys now and our name on the mailbox. We are both excited and exhausted at the thought of moving again into our long-term place, especially as we’ve accumulated more things along the way (a stand-up fan, a real drip coffee machine, a printer…), and none of them are a car. But we’ll figure it out and in just a few weeks, we’ll be home.