Flat shopping in Edinburgh

Hello all!

My husband and I are moving to Edinburgh next July. I'll be going to grad school, and we want plenty of time to settle in before school starts. However, I've been warned about the festival making places difficult to find, so I'd love some guidance as to how soon we should start getting in touch with letting agents.

Also, we'll be bringing our cat along; I'm not sure if that affects when we should start trying to find a place.

Thanks! 

I'm in England, so it could be different in Scotland.

Here, you are usually required to give 2 months notice to your landlord if you are moving out.  I have found that it's best to look about 6 weeks before you intend to move.  You may get pressure to have the start date of the tenancy earlier if the place is available immediately though.

Having a cat will reduce the number of potential properties as many do not allow pets.  I have two cats and have always had a choice in properties but it's definitely a much smaller list of choices than someone who doesn't have pets.  I have always had a deposit equal to two months rent.

My experience when I moved to England for grad school was that letting agents were not interested in helping me until I was physically there. I tried contacting some from the US, even waking up at crazy early hours to call about ones I found online and it was pretty futile. I ended up moving over and staying in a hotel for a few days. I had lined up a potential house share situation prior to moving. I met with the guy in the first couple of days, then moved in shortly after. I was there for about a month while I looked for my own place. I also had cats, so they just stayed with my parents until I found a place that allowed pets (which wasn't easy) and brought them back with me after the Christmas holiday. I understand that sending your pets over later may not be an option, so maybe find a hotel that allows pets so you can stay there while you look for a flat. Honestly though, you don't really want to let a place sight unseen. You'd be amazed how good a place can look in pictures! Plus, you can't smell mold through the internet. 

I hope you enjoy living in Edinburgh. It's my favorite city to visit!

Letting agents tend to be fairly useless even when you ARE here.  They work for the landlord and get paid their fee by the landlord, so essentially are next to useless to a tenant.  I agree with the previous poster that you need to be here to expect them to respond.  I am in London, and I found that they would bring herds of people around to one flat all at once to give the impression of "competition" for the same flat. 

I found that rightmove.com and Zoopla were far more useful because you can just call loads of estate agents as you see them come on. 

Sorry to sound so negative but it is very different than flat/apt/house hunting in the US.

Good luck!

   

I'm not too sure how it works in the US, but it sounds (from reading posts here) that you go to a letting agent, tell them what you're looking for and then they search for properties for you and get back to you with a few different ones and set up viewings for you?

It doesn't work like that at all in the UK. As maat1976 said, the agencies work for the landlord, not for the tenant - all they care about is getting a tenant for a particular property... so it's up to you to find the properties you like, across a number of different agencies, and then you contact each one individually to arrange any viewings.

So, the general flat/househunting process in the UK is:

- You look at the windows/websites of the letting agencies and make a list of the properties from each agency that you're interested in

- You contact each agency yourself, telling them which property of theirs you would like to view and they will arrange a viewing for you.

- You meet the letting agent for each property when you go to the viewing

- When you've seen each house, you decide which one you would like to rent and contact the letting agency who is responsible for it to see if it is still available.

- If it is, then you can start sorting out the paperwork with them. If not, then you'll have to re-evaluate your decision and either try to rent one of the other houses you've viewed (maybe with a different agency) or just start over and continue with the house search on your own.

So, you can see why it's difficult to try to contact agencies to help you before you are in the UK.

Thank you for all the great responses!

It looks like we should focus on finding an affordable, pet-friendly hotel and worry about finding a place once we get there. (If any of you have any suggestions on that front, I'd love to hear them.)

However, I do have a friend living in Edinburgh, so I might check out a few listings online when we get a couple of weeks out and see if she can view them for me.