What Up, Vienna? when a girl and a guy from los angeles move their asses halfway across the world

finding an apartment in vienna (part III)

So we have an apartment now. The owner is drawing up the contracts as I type, we should finish the paperwork tomorrow, and I should be able to move in by the end of the week.

I ended up looking at eight apartments before picking one. The first was a rather dark and dingy place on the ground floor of an unimpressive street near the train station. It was followed by a bright and lovely apartment on a bustling square that demanded a lot of money for an unfurnished space. Then there was a broken-down two-level penthouse suite in what otherwise looked like a housing project. Then a partly furnished place in a nice part of town where the agent surprised me by demanding a €5000 "transfer fee" for the included furniture. (I'm told this kind of fee used to be common but is generally thought to be illegal these days.) After that was a pretty neat place in The Arsenal -- a monumental series of armed fortresses built in the wake of the 1848 revolution to make sure that there wouldn't be an 1850 revolution. It was perhaps a little removed from commercial life and a little small, but I put that one on the "I'll consider it" pile.

The agent that tried to sell me a sofa and a bed for €5000 called me the next day and told me he found me a much better place which turned out to be a crap-hole in some sort of ghetto where he was asking top-dollar prices. I'm not sure if this was a real offer and he was trying to take advantage of me or if it was some sort of elaborate insult. Perhaps a little of each. Or maybe he was just terrible at his job. I think that's a given.

While that was the low point in the search, I saw two lovely places that afternoon. Both were fully furnished, classy, and surrounded by amenities and attractions. One an agent showed me in the Spittelberg region of the seventh district and another in the ninth district that was owned by a friend of a staff member here who was helping me out. Had they not turned up on the same afternoon I would've grabbed whichever came first and been delighted. Seeing them both at the same time led me to a full day of agonizing over which to take. In the end, while they were both of nominally similar prices, dealing directly with the owner of the apartment in the ninth district saved thousands of dollars in transaction costs and unbounded potential headaches of various forms. A pretty straightforward decision after all.

--AP