If you’re looking for an affordable long-term apartment to rent in Kiev, there are a couple of ways to do it: the easy way and the hard way; or, put otherwise, the cheap way and the expensive way.
You can rent apartments on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. And in each case by renting an apartment or room instead of staying in a hotel you will save money and taste more of the local flavor. Within the sphere of apartment rentals, there are as always the expensive and the less expensive options. Here are some hints on how to navigate the market to find what works best for you and your budget.
By yourself
Expect this to be the cheapest and most difficult method of apartment hunting. A google search in English for apartment rentals in Kiev almost exclusively yields sites that service short-term visitors with deep pockets and corporate credit cards. (A search in Russian yields similar sites or databases associated with real-estate agencies.)
As of late 2006 there is no such database, such as www.craigslist.org, where private individuals can advertise rental units without channeling through an agency. However, private individuals do find official and unofficial ways to advertise their real estate.
Aviso, the weekly local real-estate want ads, is available fresh every Friday at any press kiosk. (You can also choose from other print publications at the newsstand.) It lists apartments for sale and rent according to the transaction method, whether by agent or by owner (without commission). It also posts ads for real-estate agents. If you skip the first few pages of the section on apartment rentals you’ll bypass the ads for expensive short-term apartments (usually priced per diem) and discover the flats within the current market range.
Alternatively, you might get lucky, if you’re very attentive, to find an advertisement for a suitable apartment stuck to a streetlight, ad board, stop sign, bus stop, or other immobile, inanimate vertical object on the street.
In all cases you’ll need to know Russian or Ukrainian or someone who knows Russian or Ukrainian, especially when it comes time to phone owners, talk money, and finalize the deal, with or without a contract.
Perhaps your best chance for finding a rental on your own is to spread the word to any and all acquaintances that you’re planning a move and search for an apartment (or room, which is a cheaper option). You can also ask such contacts, if you have them, which neighborhoods they might recommend along your interests and price range. If nothing else you can pass this information on to a real-estate agent should you decide to go that route.
Tryukraine.com is one of very few websites that provides members with free online advertising space for landlords and renters alike, as well as a place to make contacts who may be able to help you find English-speaking agents, potential landlords and suitable housing.
Real-estate agency
Certainly the most convenient, time-saving, and worry-free method of house hunting, a real-estate agency offers everything you expect and possibly more, including knowledge of English and of Western housing standards. There are big agencies and small agencies, but probably the best agency is the one that a friend or an acquaintance recommends.
In this country the renter pays the finders fee, which usually equals half the cost of one month’s rent. Since this commission is obviously steeper for more expensive apartments, realtors may lack the incentive to locate availabilities within a lower price range. Armed with this knowledge you have a couple of options: one, know and trust your agent and her work ethic; two, tempt your agent with a personal monetary bonus for her in addition to the official commission; or, two, contact other agencies, which in this boomtown are suddenly everywhere.
Negotiating
Previously, rental agreements were made verbally, but as the legal system moves toward consistency if not stabilization, and as renting becomes more of an official business instead of a matter of financial exigency, contracts are becoming the norm. Expect to sign a contract for one year (but usually no more than twelve months in order to avoid triggering taxes) and, often, to pay two months’ rent in advance. Not every landlord will require or desire a contract, though it may be in your best interest to insist on one, especially as a foreigner in a volatile, possibly inflated, real-estate market. If you’re not looking for a yearlong agreement, ensure that the contract contains a clause that allows for an early exit given a specified period of advanced notice.
Conditions and Prices
As in any metropolitan city, real estate is most expensive in the center and less expensive as you radiate out toward the edge of the metro system, beyond the metro system to the suburbs, and on beyond the reach of relatively convenient shuttle busses and into the exurbs and the country. Besides this, other factors affect the price of a rental, including size, condition, and proximity to public transportation, especially to the metro. The usual recipe. In Kiev, though, each of these ingredients has its special flavor unique to Eastern Europe.
First, when discussing size, Realtors usually reserve statistical references such as “price per square meter” to the buying and selling of property. In renter’s parlance you’re more likely to encounter price as a factor of the number of rooms. The number of rooms includes everything but the kitchen and the bathroom, perhaps because each room is multipurpose, perhaps because the layout of many Soviet era apartments features a corridor that leads to the doors of each room. In this sense, owning an apartment is like having a number of dorm rooms, plus the kitchen and bathroom, all to yourself. For an as-is two-room apartment in a central neighborhood expect to pay between US $550 and $800.
Second, age and normal deterioration aside, the condition of most Soviet-era flats makes no pretense to comparison with Western standards. Especially in the high-rise apartment buildings, construction is famously shabby, heating and plumbing technology wonderfully outdated and inefficient, insulation a matter of speculation and personal initiative, and the concept of modern conveniences a misnomer, since most of the buildings are pushing thirty or forty years old.
Except in the most recently renovated flats, you should be surprised to find the usual conveniences such as garbage disposals, dishwashers, air conditioning, counter space, cupboard space, closet space (closets in general), washing machines and clothes dryers. In the past three or four years, as the price of real estate has doubled, tripled--and in some cases quadrupled--new, stylish high-rises have pushed up into the skyline. These new constructions come with all the modern conveniences of a modern, often Western, price tag. Many of the older apartments have undergone the so-called Euro-renovation, which, though sometimes makeshift or improvised given the layout of an individual apartment, can prove quite comfortable and convenient. For renovated apartments, a loosely applied term, prepare to pay between $700 and $2000 for two rooms in one of the central neighborhoods.
Third, proximity to a metro station means almost everything, despite the fact that there are numerous alternative modes of public transportation, including shuttle buses (“marshrutka”), trams, buses, and trolleybuses. Besides these methods, official and unofficial taxis can get you from the center on a cold night to your well-priced rental on the outskirts of town for between six and eight dollars (official taxis are pricier). Expect the price of a two-room apartment near a metro to be from 10 to 20 percent more than a comparable apartment far from a metro station. Though the metro system is quite convenient, if often overcrowded, you may find other forms of transportation more useful depending on your most consistent destinations. If you can navigate the city without exclusive dependence on the metro, you’re likely to find a better bargain.
15 November 2006
14 August 2006
Notes on being in Beijing
It’s not the third day, it’s the third entry. My intention was to write daily, but I find my powers of comprehension and articulation diluted in an imprecise mix of everything: sight, sound, smell and the fatigue of incorporating it all. This is not a new theme, but finding one has proven difficult. The things I do yield to the things I feel, and the retelling of it becomes all tone and no content. I blame my memory.
So I have a notebook, and sometimes I write in it. Here are a couple of the last excerpts.
The city is big, teeming, growing, and the pain of that growth smells. The stench is not optimistic. It originates in the exhaustion of the civil body as it overgrows itself. The trash, the dust of demolition, the over-quick entropy of poor workmanship.
I like that I haven’t seen many tourist sites here. I had my fill of them from my travels in Europe. They generally dissatisfy me because they offer little insight into present-day society or its tone and personality. And I guess I’m no historian.
It turns out that I haven’t been exposed to much intimate contact with Chinese people because nearly all of Adam’s friends are expats. It’s difficult to break into Chinese circles because foreigners carry their difference around on their faces and in the color of their hair, eyes, and skin. Marginalization based on physiognomy. Novel. People stare at Adam and me as if we’re novelties. The novelty here is based not on reputation as a westerner, as in Russia/Ukraine, but on sight. It gives me a sense of invisibility because I have the authoritative mix of anonymity and novelty that allows me to remain a superficial interest for natives who will excuse whatever excesses I exhibit as simple Western decadence.
For example, Adam and I decided to have our chests waxed to rid ourselves of that ubiquitous Western bush, the simultaneous sign of manhood and aging. The cost for deforestation per chest: $12. The woman performing the waxing said she’d never seen such abundant chest hair before and as a result made this comment: “I’m just doing this by ear.” In retrospect, I can’t blame her inexperience with foreign chests for the excruciating pain, but at the time I thought she must have been doing something wrong, otherwise why would I volunteer and pay (a fantastic, almost self-justifying price) for that masochistic rite? As Adam put it, “second to second the waxing was the most pain I’ve ever experienced.” And he’s passed a kidney stone. Now my chest is covered in red, pussy pustules where a monument to Western genetics once stood, arrogant and unperturbed. All of it—the pain, the yells, the hand squeezing, the deep breaths, the nervous laughter, the temporary celebrity, the weak thumbs ups, the after-sting—was way too much fun.
2006.08.14
So I have a notebook, and sometimes I write in it. Here are a couple of the last excerpts.
The city is big, teeming, growing, and the pain of that growth smells. The stench is not optimistic. It originates in the exhaustion of the civil body as it overgrows itself. The trash, the dust of demolition, the over-quick entropy of poor workmanship.
I like that I haven’t seen many tourist sites here. I had my fill of them from my travels in Europe. They generally dissatisfy me because they offer little insight into present-day society or its tone and personality. And I guess I’m no historian.
It turns out that I haven’t been exposed to much intimate contact with Chinese people because nearly all of Adam’s friends are expats. It’s difficult to break into Chinese circles because foreigners carry their difference around on their faces and in the color of their hair, eyes, and skin. Marginalization based on physiognomy. Novel. People stare at Adam and me as if we’re novelties. The novelty here is based not on reputation as a westerner, as in Russia/Ukraine, but on sight. It gives me a sense of invisibility because I have the authoritative mix of anonymity and novelty that allows me to remain a superficial interest for natives who will excuse whatever excesses I exhibit as simple Western decadence.
For example, Adam and I decided to have our chests waxed to rid ourselves of that ubiquitous Western bush, the simultaneous sign of manhood and aging. The cost for deforestation per chest: $12. The woman performing the waxing said she’d never seen such abundant chest hair before and as a result made this comment: “I’m just doing this by ear.” In retrospect, I can’t blame her inexperience with foreign chests for the excruciating pain, but at the time I thought she must have been doing something wrong, otherwise why would I volunteer and pay (a fantastic, almost self-justifying price) for that masochistic rite? As Adam put it, “second to second the waxing was the most pain I’ve ever experienced.” And he’s passed a kidney stone. Now my chest is covered in red, pussy pustules where a monument to Western genetics once stood, arrogant and unperturbed. All of it—the pain, the yells, the hand squeezing, the deep breaths, the nervous laughter, the temporary celebrity, the weak thumbs ups, the after-sting—was way too much fun.
2006.08.14
09 August 2006
The Third Day, Beijing, or Rest and Realization
The first title of this entry somehow translated my holiday into a sentencing, as if at the end of it there were nothing but the inevitable state of things, the quotidian, and the present in its shadow as a mere comedy brought of will and force and held up unnaturally, as if I managed by some dark magic to suspend the requirements of long-term life in the momentary rush of this new world. Holiday is, however, in no way carefree, as Mom and I learned in Italy. It requires a great deal of energy not only for the management of travel logistics but also for the assimilation of the novel, to which nearly everything applies. So the inevitability of the routine becomes a promise of the familiar that, at the moment, offers the promise of a certain relief.
This is how I feel about Beijing, though a resident protects me. I’m frightened to go outside alone without the ability to navigate the city or read the names of stores, streets, and landmarks. I may imagine a solo expedition into the city, though, and on these fictive sallies I find the odd and old fact of adaptation. Where I can’t read the name of a store, the merchandise sitting in its window betrays the secret hidden in the signs. That is, the products in a store function as the store’s signifier instead of as its signified. In this sense the value of the product itself overwhelms the quality and attraction of its branding, and what I see through the store windows becomes the name of the store itself: I see aisles of food, I think market; I see clothes, I think clothier; I see gadgets, I think electronics. But how to choose products, or how to pay, or even how to look at the attendant?
I took some lessons from Adam, a master of the art of negotiation on any continent, oriental or occidental. Successful negotiation—especially where big outdoor and indoor markets are made up of innumerable small entrepreneurs—is not just a matter of indifference, feigned or otherwise, toward the product, but instead is a function of love for the process itself. It is then, when the artificial smile, the dismissive hand gesture, the scowl and the whine, the affected aggravation, the red herring, the dodge and wheedle, the flattering word and, of course, the indifference, authentic or otherwise, that acquisition of the product itself becomes extraneous to the success of the effort. For the love of the game, art for art’s sake, lift up your eyes and rejoice, for the prodigal son has returned, suntanned, penniless, and full of stories.
So I rely on Adam, whose language and experience and nineteenth-storey apartment buffer me from the hostility of this foreignness and allow these two weeks to reconcile rest and bewilderment. No maps, no tickets, no tourists, no plotting, no worrying, no feelings of superfluity. Though I still feel stupidity when I can’t even greet someone to whom Adam introduces me, can’t say hello. So I smile a lot and nod, though such gestures belong in Japan, and I imbue the tone of my voice with cheerfulness and sincerity and complicity.
Such as at the massage parlor tonight, where a young woman shampooed my hair, massaged pressure points on my face and neck, kneaded my shoulders and arms, rubbed my hands and fingers, and pounded my upper back with her hands cupped one inside the other to deflect the full force of her short-armed swings. She was a small woman, a young woman, capable of a great deal of force that left my upper body, and by association my legs, loose and pliant. I wanted to carry on a conversation with her as Adam did with his masseuse, but I could only gesture, and at that only subtly, out of embarrassment. When she asked me to take off my glasses I just nodded and looked away. I thought she’d asked if I wanted Pantene. She repeated the request with a gesture indicating my glasses, and I smiled and looked away, embarrassed. The repeated gesture, the repeated emotion.
2006.08.09
This is how I feel about Beijing, though a resident protects me. I’m frightened to go outside alone without the ability to navigate the city or read the names of stores, streets, and landmarks. I may imagine a solo expedition into the city, though, and on these fictive sallies I find the odd and old fact of adaptation. Where I can’t read the name of a store, the merchandise sitting in its window betrays the secret hidden in the signs. That is, the products in a store function as the store’s signifier instead of as its signified. In this sense the value of the product itself overwhelms the quality and attraction of its branding, and what I see through the store windows becomes the name of the store itself: I see aisles of food, I think market; I see clothes, I think clothier; I see gadgets, I think electronics. But how to choose products, or how to pay, or even how to look at the attendant?
I took some lessons from Adam, a master of the art of negotiation on any continent, oriental or occidental. Successful negotiation—especially where big outdoor and indoor markets are made up of innumerable small entrepreneurs—is not just a matter of indifference, feigned or otherwise, toward the product, but instead is a function of love for the process itself. It is then, when the artificial smile, the dismissive hand gesture, the scowl and the whine, the affected aggravation, the red herring, the dodge and wheedle, the flattering word and, of course, the indifference, authentic or otherwise, that acquisition of the product itself becomes extraneous to the success of the effort. For the love of the game, art for art’s sake, lift up your eyes and rejoice, for the prodigal son has returned, suntanned, penniless, and full of stories.
So I rely on Adam, whose language and experience and nineteenth-storey apartment buffer me from the hostility of this foreignness and allow these two weeks to reconcile rest and bewilderment. No maps, no tickets, no tourists, no plotting, no worrying, no feelings of superfluity. Though I still feel stupidity when I can’t even greet someone to whom Adam introduces me, can’t say hello. So I smile a lot and nod, though such gestures belong in Japan, and I imbue the tone of my voice with cheerfulness and sincerity and complicity.
Such as at the massage parlor tonight, where a young woman shampooed my hair, massaged pressure points on my face and neck, kneaded my shoulders and arms, rubbed my hands and fingers, and pounded my upper back with her hands cupped one inside the other to deflect the full force of her short-armed swings. She was a small woman, a young woman, capable of a great deal of force that left my upper body, and by association my legs, loose and pliant. I wanted to carry on a conversation with her as Adam did with his masseuse, but I could only gesture, and at that only subtly, out of embarrassment. When she asked me to take off my glasses I just nodded and looked away. I thought she’d asked if I wanted Pantene. She repeated the request with a gesture indicating my glasses, and I smiled and looked away, embarrassed. The repeated gesture, the repeated emotion.
2006.08.09
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