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.