Learning Patience, or How to Not Rent an Apartment

I´m trying to put down roots...

Even before I arrived, I was worried about finding an apartment. There are dire warnings on the internet from other expats, and alas, my experience seems similar. Ideally, I need to find an apartment within a month of arrival, because an address is needed to continue the steps of the visa. And it has to be a real address, not an Airbnb or one borrowed from a friend, because I have to present the lease as evidence.

Apartments in Madrid are in short supply. This is probably partially due to the Airbnb trend, but also because tenant protections are so strong here. Landlords need to be picky, since it is hard to remove tenants if they cause problems. It is so serious that if squatters move into your own home, which you might have only left empty for a few days, it can take up to a year to remove them. So I can only imagine how hard it is to get unpaying tenants out of a home.

And I am a special case in Spain, because I am not working. If you cannot show your work contract or payslips, landlords don't want you. Credit checks or bank statements, for some reason, aren't accepted. In the past, I had heard that expats would prepay six months or a year's worth of the lease to get around this problem. However, they just passed a law making prepayment of this kind illegal. Alas, I wish the government would not protect me so much. And how do retirees in Spain deal with this? A local told me that people just don't move after they are retired.

About one week in, I realized I could not find an apartment on my own. Agents would refuse to show me places once they knew I didn't have a job, and when I did see a place there were would be 30 other people viewing it at the same time. I have now hired someone who works with expats, which means she helps navigate the system along with speaking Spanish and English. Even she is finding it hard to locate a landlord who will consider me. I am really glad that I am working with a professional relocator as well as my paralegal, but I see how much patience and time I have to put into the process. I don't even know if we will succeed in the end. Surely there must be a plan B and a plan C, but I don't know enough about the system to know what that might be.