Step 4: How to find available flats

STEP FOUR: Find Available Flats

Am I the only one who remembers driving through my college town looking for the red “room for rent” signs in house windows? Anyone? Must be an American thing.

Okay, well that’s not how you do it in Prague.

There are a few options for finding a flat in Prague, and we’ll go over each:

  1. Flat share sites or facebook groups;
  2. Realtors;
  3. Direct from owner.

FLAT SHARE SITES

Flat share sites have listings by owners of flats, by current tenants looking to fill a room, and by tenants looking for someone to take over their lease.

PROS:

  • It’s easy to plug into a flat that probably already has communal equipment you can share like sofas, dishes, pots and pans, and livable furniture already in your private room.
  • No realtor fees for moving in.

CONS:

  • You have a limited ability to select your flatmate, and it can feel like you have to adapt to their way of living.
  • Also IMPORTANTLY: As an American Citizen, you must have the written permission of the majority owner to live in that flat (we'll go over this in a later lesson). If you’re making arrangements to sub-lease, . So make sure you have direct communication with the owners of the flat.

    • you still must have the written permission of the owner, or your visa will not be approved

Some Flat Share sites on Facebook are:

REALTORS

PROS:

  • These are generally the nicer flats than you’ll find in a flatshare.
  • Realtors in general speak English well enough to translate between you and a Czech landlord.

CONS:

  • You will have to pay one full month’s rent as Realtor Fee. Rental realtors in Prague are…sketchy. They don’t do a lot to justify their fee (weekend showings? Sorry we don’t work on the weekends). And often more than one realtor will be working with a property owner, so you might think you have a handshake agreement to rent a flat, but another realtor has swooped in and gotten papers signed before you (speaking from experience here).
  • Might be a pro or a con, but you’ll be starting from scratch, even in a furnished flat, possibly needing to buy a lot of items like dishes, glassware, pots, pans, etc.

Some Realtors sites are:

DIRECT FROM OWNER

PROS:

  • You won’t have to pay a realtor’s fee.
  • You have a direct connection with the owner, making it easier to get your visa-required paperwork signed.

CONS:

  • The owners might not speak English, and might be wary of foreign tenants.
  • Might be a pro or a con, but you’ll be starting from scratch, even in a furnished flat, possibly needing to buy a lot of items like dishes, glassware, pots, pans, etc.

A direct-from-owner website is: