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Rent apartments Bucharest for short term and long term

Due to our long experience in the Bucharest rental market, we seem to get from our clients and potential clients the same questions and feed-back over and over regarding their experience of finding a proper apartments for rent in the capital city of Romania.

We will try to write down a couple of small hints and tips about what to be careful of in the rental market in Bucharest.

1. Try to see the actual properties that the accommodation websites promote.

 
There are a lot of companies who pretend to be “the best alternative”, but what they seem to forget mentioning their “scale of comparison”. Some of them are comparing themselves to “sleeping in the street” kind of accommodation, so they tend to see themselves in a very optimistic way.

The truth is that a lot of the accommodation companies in Bucharest are only just good “photo albums” on the web. They do not own the properties they promote and sometimes they use the photos of other apartments (without the consent of the owner) to make a good impression. They usually use the phrase “The property is not available for the moment, but we can recommend you another….” to redirect the potential clients to the properties they are focusing on ( usually 1 or 2 apartments ).

Also, the advantage of a picture on the internet is that it never depreciates, as an apartment does, if it is not well maintained. Seeing the actual properties is a crucial step in determining if the company which you are going to use as an accommodation provider in Bucharest is really serious and reliable.

2. Always compare the same kind of service levels when looking at different properties and companies

During the time, we had several feed-back messages from potential clients that were considering our price level for Bucharest serviced apartments “too high compared to the market”.

What we found out after several questions was very interesting. First of all we discovered that the market they were looking at was the whole real-estate arena in Bucharest.

They were including in the comparison the classic rent apartments, where the only thing being provided was the apartment and the furniture inside it.

But to compare a classic rent apartment (we do not take into account the renovation year, the design quality, etc) to a serviced apartment, especially a Corporate Apartments property, is like comparing the Romanian Dacia car with a Lexus. They are in different categories and address two different segments of the rental market.

On top of the normal rent service, a serviced apartment is a package that makes the Bucharest business traveler forget that he needs to do anything else than his work assignments while staying here.

The property administration service, the cleaning service, or payment of the utility bills are the bits that taken together deliver maximum comfort during any extended stay, or even a short term stay in Bucharest.

After a little bit of conversation on this topic we usually transformed the “potential clients” into permanent clients, who even provided referrals to their business partners after trying our services.

Of course, if you are very tight with the budget, you should consider all the options, but if your time is more precious that the extra amount paid for total comfort, you should certainly use a corporate serviced apartment.

3. In order to see if the company is trustworthy, ask for the bank transfer payment option.
 

The most respected companies in this field accept all methods of payment: cash, credit card, Paypal, wire transfer. The catch with the non-cash transfer is that once the amount is cashed in, they have to pay taxes on it, which they usually avoid doing.

Of course, we do not advise here not using cash at all if it is the best and most cost-effective method of payment for you at that moment, but remember that the refusal of the bank transfer method says something about the way that company behaves.

Our recommendation is to use the companies that accept also the non-cash methods of payments, and are flexible in the payment