A housing oddisey

Hi all, yesterday I finally secured acommodation! Whew! It was extremely difficult to find, and here is a very brief descriptions of my perils in the seek of a warm home in a cold and wet country.

Oxford is a city of 150 000 people of which more than half are students. As an exclusive place for study, the prices for housing are very high, and finding a solution to fit your budget is a very difficult task. There are 3 solutions for housing: college, university and private.

College housing is most convenient, as it is the cheapest available (from 350 pcm to 500pcm for a single person), provides catering and an excellent opportunity for meeting people of all ages and specialties. However, they are the first to go off the market so if you plan for the best acommodation option you have to apply very early. This especially applies to accomodation for couples and families, as they go out immidiately.

The university itself has a large number of dwellings they rent to students. The pricing is still convenient (from 450 pcm for a single room with shared facilities) but is a bit more expensive than college. There is a significant number of appartments for couples and families as well. This is exactly what I got! I was lucky to get an appartment for a couple for 580pcm, which was the cheapest available. Lucky me :)))

Private accomodation is the most expensive by far. Prices start at 400pcm for a single room in a shared 3-4 bedroom flat quite away from the center, and if you're lucky to find one. For a couple, the most inexpensive appartments cost 800pcm. With the university estimated living expenses of 950pcm there is absolutely no way for you and your wife/partner to live on your scholarship.

Seeking accomodation from abroad is an especially difficult task. There are some good sites with daily offers such as oxford.gumtree.co.uk, dailyinfo.co.uk and flatshare.co.uk where you can register your profile and seek for accomodation, rent or flatshare. The first problem here is trust to the remote party. Even if you find a suitable place, since you can't check it yourself you get a cat in the bag. Particularly for flatsharing, you won't know what kind of freek you'll end up with. And there are a lot of frauds lurking for people seeking from abroad. Their characteristics are that the offer is a real bargain (like 400pcm for a room in a great flat in the city center, or 500 pcm for a whole flat), they may even talk to you on the phone, and thay will request an advanced payment (security+rent) which they will request through Western Union money transfer service. That is the point when your alarm must be ringing! You must request for them to authorize themselves properly, but don't beleive on their scanned id's! The scans are easily forged in Photoshop. What you may do is request to pay with bank transfer (they must have an open bank account which can be open with provision of personal identification only) or to use an Internet service like Netcred. Only then proceed with the payment. The problem is not so much you might lose 1-2000 pounds sterling but you may arrive there with no place to stay.

Another very good solution is to contact and team up with a colleague who is already in England, so he may do the search. This is not bad, as it is highly unlikely that you would get doublecrossed by a classmate. However, there is an additional risk there - if they are offered a better housing option in the meantime they will most probably go for it and leave you alone, which is understandable when housing is so precious.

My oddisey started 3 months ago when I applied both for college and university housing (you may and should apply for both, if you get both offers you'll just decline one) and started seeking private as well. Every day I spent hours checking for offers, negotiating and so on. Frauds tried to fool me 3-4 times, but every time we got to the authorization part they just took off.I established loose alliances with other students 5 times and they all broke when they were offered from the college or university. This is something that you must account for and tell your fellow that if anyone gets better offer the deal is off, and you should not have bad feelings about it - its just business :)

Now, as I got my place, I am SO RELIEVED... I can spend the incoming month in relaxed preparation for the Oxford experience. To all incoming students still without housing - work hard on the matter and you'll succeed!