Perfect Flat

On Friday it seemed we found the perfect flat.

The flat came online Friday in the afternoon and we saw it around 8 o’clock in the evening.

• >75m² & <1.000€ per month
• 3 Rooms with a small balcony
• Silent street within a central district within Vienna (1030)
• First occupancy/ freshly renovated within an old Jugendstil building with a beautiful facade

We tried to act quickly and attempted to contact the real estate agent over the weekend and eventually reached her Monday morning. They told us that the flat was rented out within 2 hours of becoming available and that they got more than 100 requests within these 2 hours.

So how can we get a flat and sidestep the competition?

I always thought the Viennese real estate market is not too competitive. I just knew the “horror stories” from Munich or Berlin. But it seems that’s also the reality now in Vienna, unfortunate for us.

So how can we find a nice and affordable flat and avoid the battle ground with lots of competition? I basically have two ideas - let me know what you think about them and their potential success rate.

Offline Search

With offline search I mean activities like putting up flyers in supermarkets in the desired area, advertise a small ad in some local newspapers or putting small fly sheets on the entrance of some nice buildings. Basically, everything which is not online and therefore requires more effort.

Increase the speed

Second option I see is to increase the speed. The search agent on Austria’s biggest real estate portal only delivers updates once per day. As we can’t (and don’t want to) refresh the webpage every 30min I need some sort of automation. My first thoughts are going into the direction of a small web-scraper (probably built in Python as I want to improve it), combined with a Telegram (?) bot which notifies you on the phone every 15min if something comes online, hosted on e.g. Heroku.