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Average Apartment Rents @ 31st March 2008

After seven years in the business of finding flats and apartments to rent in Madrid, we have amassed a considerable amount of data on the rental market. You might be interested to know which are the cheapest, and which are the most expensive areas. We also have data on average sizes of various types of flats, and also the average rent for long term lets. Short term let prices are proportionally higher depending on the duration of the let, the shorter the time period the more expensive the rent. In order of cheapest to most expensive, these are the areas of Madrid that we deal with:

Arganzuela
Tetuan
Chamartín
Retiro
Moncloa
Centro
Chamberí
Salamanca

Across all areas, these are the average sizes and monthly rents:

Type	Average Size (m²)	Avg Rent For 1 Yr Let (€/mth)
Single room in shared flat		401
Double room in shared flat		567
Studio	33	661
1 bedroom	50	832
2 bedrooms	70	1015
3 bedrooms	101	1246
4 bedrooms	137	1584

Tags: Madrid, rent, prices

07/05/2008 | 3980 page views

How Innova Helped a Desperate Couple Find a Flat

I remember Tim and Maggie, who came to my office last September. They were sweaty and frustrated: August and September are very busy times in the rental market, and if you are short on contacts and your Spanish is poor or non-existent, you'll find it very hard to even get an appointment to view anything. This is what Tim told me about their experience...

We had been living in Dubai for the last six years, and decided that we wanted to return to Europe. I'd got used to constant sunshine, so the UK held no appeal, but Spain certainly did. Maggie had been applying for teaching jobs all over Spain, but to no avail. She has English teaching qualifications, so, even though it was a bit of a gamble, we thought it was reasonable that she would easily find a job as soon as we arrived in Madrid (I'm a freelancer, so the concept of 'a job' doesn't apply as such - all I need are clients with pockets full of money).

The job gamble worked: within two weeks, Maggie had an offer from one of the bigger institutions. Finding accommodation was much more difficult. We spent the first week in a hotel, and during that time we scoured adverts in newspapers. The language was an enormous challenge: we had tried to learn some Spanish in the years before we made the move, but when you hear it spoken by a native at high speed down a telephone, you just want to give up and cry. We did have one stroke of luck though: one of the advertisers spoke French. Maggie speaks French. And so an appointment was made, and we took the apartment. It was only available for one month, but it gave us time to do some serious looking.

We did manage to look at a few apartments, but they were not to our liking. We thought they were a bit small, but now we know better! Small is what Madrid apartments are. With one week of our month-long let remaining, we were starting to panic. One appointment to view turned out to be a meeting with an agency who wanted one month's rent in exchange for which they would give us their latest list of available flats. And they din't speak English. I thought this was just a very expensive way of buying a newspaper with classified adverts, and so I declined.

Then we hit gold! An ad led us to Mike and Innova. We went to his office, on a Sunday, it was, and he produced three properties that matched our requirements. He called the landlords and arranged for us to view the properties that afternoon. As it happened, none of them were quite right (actually one of them was perfect, but not in a location that I was comfortable with: unusually for Madrid, it was too quiet rather than too noisy).

Back to Mike the next day, and we upped the budget a bit. The first property he found was the one we eventually took. After we'd seen it and fallen in love with it, Mike negotiated with the landlord, who was a bit worried about my self-employed status and income (hey, so am I!), and arranged a meeting to go through the lease and sign it.

The next day, we moved in. Mike helped us get the phone and internet connected, and continues to help us to this day.

And the price for all of this help was a fraction of that demanded by the first agency we saw.

I wish I had more clients like that! - Mike.

Tags: apartment, Madrid, Chueca

06/05/2008 | 2837 page views

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