The first thing that’s important to know about renting a flat in Edinburgh is that a tenant only needs to give 1-month notice. There are a lot of less than lovely apartments in the city, and people move around a lot to find the place that suits them best. That means that once an apartment is listed to let, it is quickly rented. It also means that you can’t realistically look for an apartment until about a month before you plan to arrive, unless you want to pay for extended time you’re not living in it. This makes planning an international move somewhat precarious.
The second thing that’s important to know is that you need to have a Scottish bank account in order to easily rent a place. Rents are pulled directly from the account. The Catch-22 about it all is that you need a lease to open a bank account. Which comes first? To get around the issue, you can pay 6-months of rent and the security deposit, often 2 months of rent, up front. Let’s say you move in and don’t love the place. You give your 1-month notice and move, but you’ve still got 7 months of rent tied up until the letting agency gets around to refunding you or you figure out how to go to court to get it back. It was a bit daunting! We managed to convince our agency that we would pay 3 months up front and 1 month security deposit. This would give us the address so we could set up the bank account so we could move to monthly account draws. You can avoid all this by having a solvent Scottish citizen serve as a co-signor, but that person may be hard to come by.
The third thing it’s important to know is that HMO and tenement do not meant the same things in Scotland as in the US. Where we were looking an HMO was essentially a student rental. An HMO license is required if three or more people from different households share amenities in a rental. We avoided any HMO listing. And a temement is a large apartment building of which there are many in Edinburgh. They needn’t be squalid or overcrowded, as we many imagine a tenement to be. They are mostly Georgian in design and often have a dark tight, spiral concrete staircase from floor to floor.
The fouth thing important to know is a local person who can check out the places for you. We learned about HMO’s when a friend checked out what seemed like a nice place – from the photos – to learn it was a smelly, sticky student rental in a student building. It wasn’t the best fit for our middle-aged selves.
Most flats are rented through management agencies. Very little interaction occurs between a landlord and a tenant, and finding a private rental is not easy. Rettie, Zoopla, Right Move, CityLets, Edlets, and Gumtree are all sites to check out. Many flats are cross-listed. Write to the agent(s) of any places you find that will work for you. You will want to jump on anything and move quickly because apartments move fast. Give a bit of a short story about yourself when you connect with the agent. You will need to spend a considerable amount of time looking for a place. Furnished places are more common than in the US.
Once you find an acceptable and available place, you will need to be vetted. Obviously, you will need to provide all proofs of financial stability. You may be asked to provide over 6 months of pay stubs, letters from employers, savings amounts and records, etc. Anyone over 16 living in the flat will be listed on the lease and have to go through the vetting process. It helps to have savings, 2 incomes, and to have been in a stable job.
After you move in, verify the management company has transferred the utilties to your name, which they often have not. Then call the utility company, which is often gas and electric combined, to set up payment. Auto-pay from a Scottish bank account makes for lower bills, but you can set up the account and pay by credit card. Water is part of Council taxes. Once utilties are set, you need to set up your Council tax payments. These too are monthly draws from a Scottish bank account. Tenants are responsible for the property taxes. Edinburgh is divided into Zones, with the more prosperous and desireable locations having the highest tax rates.
Our monthly tax bill and our utilites were around 350 each.
In case you’re wondering, landlords have to give 2-month’s notice to boot a tenant.
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