Apartment hunting in Guangzhou – The impossible hunt for cheap and good

A year ago I wrote about apartment hunting in Guangzhou and how we found our dream home. Now it’s time to move to a new home. Chinese landlords usually makes one year contracts and after that they tend to raise the rent. Our landlord wants to raise the rent 300RMB and because we don’t agree, we are looking for a new place to live.

Apartments are more expensive now than year ago. Near the north gate of Sun Yat-Sen University you can find a one bedroom one living room apartment for 2700-3000RMB. For one room studio apartment you need about 2300-2500RMB. These are of course the starting prices for decent apartments, you can find something much more expensive too if you want to.

Near the south or west gate of the Sun Yat-Sen University, you can find cheaper apartments, but they tend to be really dirty and in bad condition.

Basically finding something both cheap and good is very hard everywhere. We have seen more than ten apartments already, but still haven’t found something passable. There are four important factors in the hunt: 1. allows a cat 2. price 3. location 4. cleanliness. All the factors from 2 to 4 have an effect on each other. In order to get a cheaper rent you need to move further away and have a dirtier apartment.

Our apartment hunt is still going on and we have to find something before the 13th this month, that’s next week. Gotta hurry!