A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

In the past year and a half since I moved to Shanghai, I have had to move twice.

The first time was two and a half months into my first lease, when my landlord suddenly decided he felt like  selling my flat. I had two choices: I could vacate within two weeks and get one month’s compensation for my troubles plus my deposit back, or I could take my contract’s  one-month’s-notice clause and forfeit the compensation and  allow estate agents to show my flat to buyers at their convenience.  Neither option was reasonable, and, as I discovered through the assistant at my school, they weren’t exactly legal either. You are entitled to two months‘ compensation up front if you are booted out early with no warning and they are not entitled to show your flat while you are still in it.

That was my first flat.

After kicking up a terrible fuss, I pocketed my two months’ compensation and my deposit and moved into Doug’s flat in the French Concession.  After a year spent enjoying the broken shower stall, dry rot, noisily renovating neighbours, a mysterious nocturnal smoke monster, disintegrating and stained furniture and archaic drains, our landlord kindly gave us three months’ warning in early May that he wanted to move back in come September but would need some time to renovate over the summer (apparently he doesn’t care for dry rot or broken shower stalls either).  We were planning to leave anyway when our 6-month extension was up in August but the news meant we had to start looking immediately to be out on time.

Lesson # 1: Try to avoid renting a flat just as a major local event is kicking off (think, Olympics, Expo).  Prices have skyrocketed because of the Shanghai 2010 Expo and availability is down.  We were shown flats identical to our current one (just upstairs, in fact) that were 1500rmb/month more expensive.  They weren’t even nicer.

Lesson#2: Don’t honestly tell estate agents your expected rental price range. Go about 20-30% lower than what you expect to pay and let them persuade you up to it.  I was foolish when I first started looking and I honestly told them our maximum price was 8000rmb a month. So, for two weeks, I was shown around to a pointless series of 9000rmb flats. I repeatedly restated our maximum and was repeatedly dragged to places far above it. I changed tactics for my next round, and said we were looking for flats in the 6000-7000rmb range.  We were shown a series of 8000rmb flats. Much better.

Lesson#3: Negotiate. Everything is negotiable. Our landlords lowered our rent, threw in a free fapiao (the stamped rental receipt that normally costs 5% of the rent that Doug needs to get his housing allowance) and gave us a 2600rmb budget to buy brand new mattresses for the flat.  They also initially wanted 2 months’ deposit but accepted one month.

Lesson#4: Don’t use the city-wide English speaking agents. They only want to deal with the flats that cater to the monied expats. If you don’t feel like renting a 10k+ flat in a shiny gringo compound, bypass them.  Go to the neighbourhoods you like, find the tiny estate agent offices, grab a business card, and get someone Chinese who you know to call them up and explain exactly  what you are looking for.  Ask them to forget to mention that you are foreign. You’ll have a better chance at actually getting shown something nice and not obscenely expensive that way.

Lesson#5: Keep looking. It’s dire out there. It really is. If you want to be really central, the rents will be brutally high and the buildings crappy. If you go further out, you’ll get better value but, whoa, you’ll be way out. Think about your commute. Think about access to groceries and sanity (cafes, bars, restaurants). We chose to be very very central, for both work and sanity.  This meant we had to endure awful, peeling, grungy flat after dire, crumbly, grotty flat. A few were nice enough, but only compared to the ones with the visible dry rot and ripped sofas and cracked walls covered over with toothpaste.   A few were nice and reasonably priced but were so far from the metro that my commute would have taken over 90 minutes each way. Hardly worth the savings- and really, the environs of just south of Zhaojiabang Road are grim grim grim. Not what you want to wake up to in the mornings.

If you want to live in Shanghai and your job doesn’t come with housing, you need to know that Shanghai is NOT like the rest of  China. This is not a city where you can find a flat for 1500rmb/month.  You will need to spend an annoying amount of time running around looking at crap, then trying to negotiate a better deal on what you finally find. Centrally, for a 2 bedroom flat, aim for 5000-6000 a month if you don’t want peeling walls and collapsing ceilings and broken cupboards. Seriously. If you go beyond the Yan’an Ring Road, you can go down to 4000.  When I was wayyyyy out in the wilds of Pudong (Century Park), I was able to get a smallish 2 bedroom flat for 3800.  The kitchen was the size of a cubicle but it was cleanish and not mildewed or full of roaches (other people had those bounties). However,  several of the windows were jammed open just a few centimetres and I more than made up the savings in heating bills.  Shanghai is cold in the winters and the heaters can’t keep up with the heat loss.