Hello! To go along with my Instagram post I am going to tell you a bit about my experience with finding private housing in Uppsala using Uppsala Bostadsförmedling

note: this is just my experience using it and perhaps it is different than yours

What is Uppsala bostadsförmedling?
It is essentially a nation wide housing queue that attempts to make housing an easy and accessible process for everyone living in Uppsala municipality. 

Once you join the housing queue (which costs 305sek per year) you are able to put your name on waiting lists for different housing options. The longer you are in the queues, the more points you will acquire and therefore you will be in higher priority for housing. 

How to join?
It’s very easy. You just need to sign up on the website using your email address (you can also use your person number if you have one- or add it to your profile once you are here and have one)

You can pay using any type of bank account even if it’s international

NOTE: Make sure to sign up as a student! This gives you access to student only housing and also means that if you sign a contract your housing queue position is unaffected

What next?
You can search for different housing options within Uppsala, such as the amount of rooms, size in m2, price of rent. From then you can ‘express interest’ and join the specific waitlist for that housing option. 

Often there are many people joining the wait lists and some people maybe have been in the queue a lot longer than you but don’t give up hope! Just keep applying to everything you can and eventually you will get lucky. 

My tip would be to apply for as many places as you can, even if it isn’t your dream home. Once you have a place you can continue to apply to more places and move once you get here but it’s better to have somewhere to live than no where to live

Types of contracts:

1: Permanent Contracts 

2: Short term contracts

A permanent contract essentially means that the house is your house, and will be until you decide to move out. In most cases you will not be asked to leave by the rental agency at any point and you can do what you want with the house. If you want to cancel your contract/move out you need to give three months notice. 

A short term contract is a month to month contract where the rental agency is allowed to cancel the contract with only one months notice. This is normally due to planned renovations in the area. This contract also means that you, as the renter, only have to give one months notice if you want to move out. 

My personal experience:
I joined the housing queue in November, before I even knew whether I would be accepted into Uppsala just so I could accumulate as many queue points as possible. I also moved to Uppsala with my best friend and we both joined the queue at the same time. 

As soon as I got my acceptance from Uppsala we started seriously looking at the houses and thought about when we wanted to move (as I am from the UK I needed to get a visa, and the visa states the earliest I was allowed to move to Sweden was the 1st of August). 

It was around about the end of April that I started applying for houses with a move in date in july/august. 

It wasn’t until the first week of June that we secured the number one spot on a waitlist for an apartment. This apartment required an in person viewing but obviously as I was not yet in Sweden, I contacted StudentBoet to ask them if they could attend on my behalf. They agreed and went to the viewing and filmed the apartment for me free of charge. (Note; not all houses require in person viewings, only a few). 

We then confirmed that we wanted the house via Uppsala Bostadsförmedling and we were then put in touch with Rikshem (a rental agency) who we eventually signed our contract with. This apartment was a short term contract. 

We had to sign our contract in person but luckily we were visiting Sweden at the end of June and were able to take the short train ride to Uppsala to sign the contract. (Note: Many places will allow you to digitally sign your contract)

Our contract started on the 1st of July, so we did have to pay a month of rent before we officially moved to Uppsala on August 1st. We did this because  we didn’t want to wait too long and not have anywhere to live so decided it was for the best.

That is essentially my housing story but it differs for each person so do as much research as you can!

I hope this was somewhat helpful. If you have any questions you can ask me, but also Google was my best friend and I found out all the information I needed by googling or contacting the companies directly. There are a lot of resources online which are helpful. I recommend using youtube, reddit and even tiktok to find tips and tricks that perhaps official sources don’t make clear!