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Comment by zupatol | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this is of no help to me. Here in Geneva, Switzerland, the problem is not choosing the apartment, but being chosen among all the other people who want the same apartment you do. I've seen people stand in line just to visit one apartment. I hear there are even worse places than Geneva for finding an apartment.

Businesses have sprang up to help people find apartments, so it is possible to outsource your apartment hunt too, but it costs much more than 90$.

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This is absolutely true. I am moving to CERN this weekend and found that securing somewhere to live was extremely stressful, not to mention expensive.

I am actually surprised that, given that housing is a basic human need, there is no mass-market apartment-finding company that takes all the horrible awkward work out of finding an apartment and makes it easy and convenient. I've no idea how you'd do it - maybe build entire neighbourhoods based on typical lifestyle choice sets and market those individually. Maybe something like that exists in the US? I've never seen someone successfully do that in Europe.

Why is housing so hard to come by anyways? I'm just curious.. it would seem like someone would rise to fill that need if people are literally standing in line to be interviewed for the chance to rent a place.

In my city, the average family income is about $60k but housing is expensive to buy. One-bedroom condo's start at $200k so a lot of people rent. Unfortunately, since developers can earn so much by selling units instead of renting them, they all veer towards that.

I'm sure rent control plays a factor too. Rent can only be increased by 3% per year or something like that.

End result, there hasn't been a new building built for rental apartments in my city for over 30 years.

Seems like unless there's a constant influx of people, eventually everyone that wants to buy a condo will end up with one... leaving a lot of built-up condos ready to sell, with nobody buying. Wonder how long it'll take.

Renting regulations are pretty notorious in Switzerland. There seems to be a rule for everything & it is notoriously hard to get rid of a bad renter. Also, as a foreigner, it is often difficult to acquire property in certain kantons.

If I had to guess I'd say the demand is for "housing within N kilometers of point X" and there is nowhere left to build housing in that area, whether because of physical constraints or legal/regulatory constraints (e.g. can't get a permit to demolish that block and put up a dense high rise).

(Edit for non-USA-ian units, since we were talking about Geneva.)

> the problem is not choosing the apartment, but being chosen among all the other people who want the same apartment you do

Do you have some sort of rent control or other laws in place keeping people from raising prices? If 20 people want an apartment, one of them would usually be willing to pay $50 or $100 more per month to get the place. These kinds of shortages were a big problem in Los Angeles and New York until they relaxed rent control.

There is some sort of rent control, but at the same time I have the impression that rents are going up fairly quickly.

Offering to pay more rent than advertised is a good idea, I might try that.

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