Five tips to help you hold on to your sanity and get a fair deal in the Shanghai property search.

1. The estate agent doesn’t care what kind of apartment you want.

This can be the most frustrating thing to come to terms with if you aren’t expecting it. So expect it. You’ll tell him:

• your budget
• the location you want to live in
• he number of bedrooms and bathrooms you expect,
• the minimum square measurements you want
• even the street you want to live on

He, with commission on the brain and a total disregard for your spec in his heart, will proceed to take you on a wild, incredibly hot and rage-inducing goose chase, showing you everything but what you actually asked for.
The way round this: Don’t blindly agree to meet the agent at his office so he can lead you a merry dance. Over the phone, ask him for precise details of each property he wants to show. If they are not exactly what you are after, don’t bother leaving the air-conditioned sanctity of home – he can call you back when he’s found something that meets your criteria.

2. Expat-focused sites AREN’T a good resource for good deals on housing

The apartments advertised on City Weekend, Emoo and Craigslist are invariably pitched at above market value. While these sites, and others like them, might offer ease of search (English listings, English-speaking agents) that’s the only thing they have over Chinese sites or walking into agencies. If you go the local route:

• you will get a much wider range of choice
• you can be a lot more promiscuous in your search by engaging several agents to look for a place for you at the same time
• you can get the local rate; not the you’re-not-Chinese-so-I’m-going-to-assume-you’re-loaded rate

How to do this: A combination of Dict.cn and Google Translate are all you need to get the ball rolling. Without being able to read a single Chinese character, you can still pinpoint addresses that have apartments in your price range by doing simple searches for the street or district name and the Chinese word for either “rent” or “apartment”. Then translate the results into your language. Of course, setting up the appointments is a little trickier. Trickier but still do-able. When my sister first arrived in China and I couldn’t get time off work to look for a place, she had to do it. She’d been in Shanghai about three weeks when I wrote down key phrases for her on a sheet of paper which she produced at each agency she visited. That’s how we found our last place. And, the apartment hunting lexis is tiny – you pick up the key phrases in no time.

3. Don’t be seduced by subway-adjacent properties.

They’re much more expensive than those only served by buses and not at all worth it. For a city that likes to bill itself as a kick-ass metropolis, Shanghai’s metro shuts down at a ridiculously early hour (10pm on average). Instead, find a property near the end/beginning of a popular bus route. One that passes by at least one of your most frequently visited locations.
How to do this – Set aside a weekend to just ride random buses. It’s a great way to explore the city, it’s cheap and it’s useful for harvesting estate agent telephone numbers as you ride through areas you wouldn’t mind living in. As you go, you’ll also learn a lot about the amenities – markets, gyms, supermarkets, bars, restaurants – and figure out what routes serve which subway stations.

4. Be demanding.

This is not the same as being rude or unyielding but there are certain extras that you should go ahead and ask for. It’ll go one of two ways: the landlord will say no (and you’ve lost nothing), or he’ll say yes, and you win. 50-50. I’ll take those odds. I’m a bit of a hoarder so I’m always keen for extra storage space – bookshelves, night stands, laundry baskets, coat racks, shoe stands etc. Right now is a particularly good time to be up front about your requests; it’s definitely a renter’s market.

5. Bargain like you mean it.

Not like it’s an annoying preamble you can’t wait to get out of the way. You see this all the time when you go to the markets: people paying the second price that they are quoted. As they fish out 500RMB for a faux-leather handbag with some historic dignitary’s face emblazoned across it, you hear the self-congratulation dripping from their voices: “Ooh, that’s only $X in real money.” Egads.

If the landlord’s haggling over that last 300RMB, tell him that the 3600RMB he’ll lose over a year by renting it out to you at your price is less than the thousands he’ll lose if the property stays vacant even a single month more. That’s logical and fair. Most people respond to that.

Today is a personal blog. I rarely write about my family or my friends in this blog. I save that for my other, private little corner of the net, where no-one knows my name.

But today I will spill a little bit of happy into Artonym. For a change.

Last week, someone stole some money from a friend of mine’s Dad. US$700. Which might not seem much to you, but when you consider that the average salary in Zimbabwe is US$50 you might get why this was a big deal. This was money that’d been scraped together over several months so her parents could get a borehole installed and live it up with luxuries like clean drinking water and an occasional bath.

Her Dad was horrified and really torn up about it. When I found out, I hated those thieves. Hated them with a passion that seems only to ever come to the fore when I think about what my country has become and the people responsible for it. But in among that hatred was the knowledge that, if the opportunity to earn an honest living was denied to me, like it no doubt had been denied the person who’d taken the money, I’d steal too.

Last night I was still thinking how pointless it all was and raging against the tyrannical machine that had reduced us to thieves and beggars when I got a call saying that the money had been recovered. In full.

Finally. Some good news. I needed that to end my week. It’s been heavy going, y’know?

Today is day 1. Day 1 of giving up the following for 14 days:

• Nicotine
• Laughter
• Carbohydrates
• Caffeine

Laughter is not meant to be on the list. But its loss is an inevitable byproduct of my self-denial. Nicotine shouldn’t be there either since I, technically, gave up smoking at New Year’s. But sometimes, not often, but sometimes, when I’m having the most mind-crushing day ever, it’s that or cheesecake.

Spring is here. I need to drop a few kgs to get back into last year’s wardrobe. Damn you, Chinese food. Why are you so delicious? Stop it, you artery-clogging temptress, you.

Today, I’m talking Jade Goody. She’s sick, and she’s dying so I am not going to badmouth her at all. But I am going to challenge the notion that what she is doing – this theatre of deterioration and manipulation that she is conducting – is somehow noble (noble!) and praiseworthy.

These things are always subjective, and it’s tough to blog about anything without giving away an opinion, and, insodoing, seeming judgmental. Jade Goody is a 27yr-old, terminally ill, mother of 2. Only someone with a heart of stone would not think that someone in such a position deserves to be cut some slack but….but…this, this thing that she is doing, it’s pornographic. Minus the sex.

• Laying herself bare.
• Fixing the lens of public scrutiny on her most private, vulnerable moments
• Pandering to the voyeur in all of us
• Asking us to get off on it

So here’s the question, Jade: why didn’t you just make a porn film? I mean, if you wanted to be graphic, if you wanted to give no holds barred access to everyone, if there was no voyeuristic stone you wanted to leave unturned, why not just set up a camera in your room and invite us to subscribe for $<insert exorbitant amount here> per minute of footage?

If it’s the exhibitionist sex that puts you off, you don’t even have to be the one who does it. You could hire actors. It can be Tragedy Porn. Cancer porn. Chemo Porn. Dignity and privacy be damned, right? I haven’t googled these terms. I’m too scared to. But there’s a market for pretty much everything. You know that as well as anyone. You could just stand in a corner while they go at it and say: “I’m Jade Goody. I’m dying. I endorse this”. At least that’s honest. Unlike this stage-managed concert of gloom orchestrated to feed your bottom line.

And if the bottom line is money, why hire, I’m guessing, (one of) the most expensive publicist(s) in the country to be your voice? The ubiquitous Max Clifford is on every single media outlet telling us how you are feeling. That’s right: Max Clifford is tuned in to your feelings. How does that not horrify you? Max Clifford, for goodness sake! And yet, with a single camera and a steady Internet connection, you could’ve achieved the very same effect – without lining any publicists’ pockets – and we’d get to choose if we wanted to have an unrelenting torrent of …well…you forced down our constricted throats.

I’m full, Jade. Enough. Please. Enough. I’ve tried to dial back the insensitive jerk in this post. Of course I have no idea what being you is like. But, for what it’s worth, you should’ve made the porn film. I might not have tuned in, but at least I’d respect the what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of it: my few bucks in exchange for your utter and complete exposedness. That would’ve at least been honest. Unlike this.