The apartment hunt
Our Paris adventure was to begin in July and we wanted to arrive and go directly to our new, perfect, apartment. The question was how to make this plan a reality?
When deciding upon the timeline, we grilled Michelle, our relocation agent from A Good Start in France, about when would be best. Is there a month that would be most advantageous to hunt for apartments? A time of the month? A day of the week? The answer to all of these questions was “There is no best time. Choose a day about a month before you’d like to move in.” Apparently, the Paris market is very dynamic and things move quickly. There is little point in advance research, except to educate ourselves and prepare our expectations. I was interested to learn that in France, tenants can give one-months notice at any time during the month. This means there is not necessarily a spike of availabilities at the end of the month as there is in Canada. We chose a day in early June and I planned to come to Paris to look for our apartment. To my delight, my very dear friend Eloise was able to come with me! What had been a daunting task to accomplish alone became another exciting adventure to look forward to.
In our mind's eye, the perfect Paris apartment would have Haussman architecture including white walls, large windows, high ceilings, and shabby chic furnishings, basically the Paris cliché. We wanted three-bedrooms, which is huge by Paris standards. We decided that our girls would be happier, and by extension, we would be happier if they each had their own space. Knowing that we would also want to make room for Desmond and my parents to visit, three bedrooms seemed luxurious but not unreasonably so. The second most important criteria was the ability to walk to school. I love to walk and I love for my girls to walk. I had a romantic vision of us taking our school route everyday and absorbing the energy on the streets. Cramming the girls into a metro every morning didn’t hold the same appeal. Criteria in hand, Margaret, a member of Michelle’s team, researched and found a list of 10 apartments for us to look at.
On the day of our apartment hunt, it was pouring rain. This helped to put my romantic notions in context and the distance from the school moved up on my priority list.
We saw nine apartments in one day. They ranged from 78m2 to 200m2 and from a 10 to 30 minute walk to school. Much to our girls’ delight, they all had three bedrooms. Some had tiny, tiny kitchens. One had an “electric toilet”, and not sure what that meant, I decided we wanted to avoid it. Some were beautiful architecturally, but the furniture was a little worse for wear. There was one that perfectly fit our dream of the Paris apartment, but it was a good 25 minute walk to the school and in a neighbourhood we hadn’t visited before or considered. One of the many agents that day said to me, “In Paris, you always have to make a compromise.”. I hesitated because I worried about an hour of walking a day during, what I've heard, can be cold Paris winters. I considered choosing the second best apartment which was 10 minutes from school but I just couldn't do it. By 6pm, I had decided. I wanted the dream apartment even it meant a longer walk.
I let Michelle know that I had made my choice. We learned though, that just because you want an available apartment, that doesn’t mean you can have that apartment. Michelle submitted our application, which included copies of our passports, a letter from Houman’s employer, reference letter from our banker, last 3 months of salary stubs, last 2 years of tax returns, and for good measure, a curriculum vitae and a personal letter describing our “project in France”. It took a full week before we received verbal confirmation that our application was accepted and another full week after that before we received a lease document. Those were stressful weeks as we wondered, what would happen if it didn’t work out? The other apartments I had looked at would probably be gone. Would we have to start over? On the bright side, Michelle confirmed that our apartment was represented by just one agent. This is not always the case as we saw apartments that were listed with more than one agency and were advertised multiple times on multiple websites with different rental rates.
In the end everything came together. Michelle managed to secure a lease for us and even avoided us having to put 12 months rent into trust (this had been a very realistic possibility). She completed the incredibly thorough pre-move-in inspection, which is done with a bailiff, the same bailiff who will come back when we move out. All of this work on her behalf allowed us to come to our apartment directly from the airport, together with our 560lbs of luggage which we took up in the elevator one piece at a time.
It only took a day for us to feel settled. After buying groceries at neighbourhood stores just steps from our home and picking up some essentials at the local Monoprix we explored the local park and found our metro stations. We couldn’t be more grateful. It is our perfect Paris apartment.
