Home Hunting Far from Home

The first major hurdle we had to clear upon arriving in Taipei was finding a place to live. We knew we wanted to live near Carolina’s work, but beyond that, we didn’t really know what to expect. Lots of forum posts I read said not to bother with going through an agent, that they weren’t very helpful in Taipei, but we felt like it’d be overwhelming without someone to guide us through it. So we reached out to a few people we knew who had moved here and asked them about their agents. That didn’t work out — they responded slowly if at all. We tried a few sites that were in English: TeaLit, the site I did a lot of job hunting through, had some places listed but they were more aimed at roommates and cheaper places, and a few real estate agencies had sites in English but their listings were very limited. Instead we turned to the most frequently recommended site, 591 .

591 does not have an English version of its site. But, as several interneters pointed out, using Chrome to run the site through Google Translate works well enough. Usually the majority of the information was complete gibberish, but we could look at pictures and find the apartment on a map, then use Taipei’s ubiquitous messaging app LINE to contact the lister. We had good luck with people getting back to us fast and either speaking English or being adept enough to use a translation app to talk to us. But beyond that, yeah, most of the agents added very little to the overall process, including two occasions when the agents were so late for our meeting that the landlord showed us the apartment without them. The plus side to this was that the agents also weren’t high pressure salespeople unlike some transactions in the US.

The overall good news was that we saw several apartments that we could see ourselves living in, so the process became about figuring out our priorities more than finding the “right” apartment.

The funny thing is, we ended up finding the apartment we chose by walking into a real estate agent’s office and asking if anyone there spoke English. They didn’t, but one of them had a friend who did. They connected us with the friend, Nelson at UR House Realty. He was definitely an exception among the other realtors we encountered. We saw three apartments with Nelson, and maybe fifteen apartments total.

Decision making went something like this.

Considerations:

Big: Furnished or unfurnished? Did we need a clothes washing machine? An elevator? What neighborhood did we want to be in? How much should we spend?

Medium: Did we need a microwave? A building that handled the trash versus doing it ourselves? How new should the building be? Should the landlord speak English? How long of a lease should we sign? Is there enough closet space?

Small: Did we need an oven? A security guard? Not for security, mind you, but to accept packages for us. Would we ever use a gym? A ping pong table? A karaoke room???

We instantly decided on furnished, probably due to the fact that we had just spent so much time and energy getting rid of a house’s worth of stuff (furnished seemed to add about $100/month, based on viewing similar quality apartments). We agonized a little over location versus amenities, but ultimately we picked an apartment that was new, a little bigger, and a little nicer overall but further out of the heart of the city than we had planned initially, though still not as far out as several of Carolina’s coworkers, who live way out in New Taipei City. Carolina’s commute is walkable, and my commute will be a single, very short five-stop bus ride. We thought we were moving away from a convenient grocery store or a wide range of restaurants, but that’s turned out not to be the case as we’ve explored the surrounding area. We don’t have an oven or microwave, but will probably be buying a countertop oven. We have a washing machine but no dryer. We have an elevator and a mostly-present, very friendly security guard.

Overall we’re very happy, but two changes would make the place perfect: 1) If the space taken up by a bath tub was replaced by a closet and 2) if the ceiling was 1–2 feet lower and the extra space was used to insulate us from our upstairs neighbor’s loud late-night footsteps.