Apartment Rental Guide: Searching for an Apartment
Last
year I covered my experience in renting three different unfurnished
apartments in MedellÃn in a popular four-part series.
After living in the same apartment in
Belén
for past two years I thought I would be able to renew my lease for
another year. But, unfortunately, the owner of the apartment wanted his
apartment back as he wanted to live in it.
So I found myself searching for an apartment in MedellÃn last month
with my soon to be Colombian wife. We fortunately found the perfect
apartment for us in
Sabaneta.
Finding the perfect apartment in MedellÃn (for us)
MedellÃn has a variety of options for apartments available in a broad
range of prices (from less than $200 to well over $2,000 per month) to
meet the needs of renters.
In many neighborhoods, you can also find two-story attached row
housing. You won’t however find in MedellÃn many single-family detached
homes that are common in the U.S. You have to get outside of the city to
find these.
I have already lived in MedellÃn for four years, and I know the city
very well, so I know what type of apartment would be perfect for us.
I also have researched the unfurnished apartment market in MedellÃn, which was covered in two articles on this website (
Apartment Rental Costs in MedellÃn and
4 Inexpensive Neighborhoods for Apartment Rentals in MedellÃn), so I know the neighborhoods in the city well.
We wanted an apartment in a high-rise with 24×7 security on a higher
up floor with a balcony with an excellent view. In addition, we wished
to find an apartment within walking distance to a grocery store and
close to the metro.
We also wanted to find an apartment in a building that is not close
to a major street to avoid noise from traffic. We also wanted to be in
an Estrato 4 or 5 neighborhood.
Also, we wanted the apartment to have Claro Internet/TV/phone service available and for it to have a kitchen with an oven.
We also wanted to find an apartment that was larger than the 78
square meter apartment we were moving out of. We were looking for an
apartment with at least 90 square meters of space.
Kitchen in our new apartment in Sabaneta
My fourth apartment search
We used a combination of methods to find an apartment in MedellÃn. We
found some apartments ourselves by walking around and finding rental
signs in windows and using the
Espacio Ubano website.
We also used my real estate agent in MedellÃn, who I have rented from over the past three-plus years.
Since I already know the market in MedellÃn very well, we limited our
search to just a few neighborhoods. We did not want to look in popular
neighborhoods for foreigners like El Poblado or Envigado as we want to
live in a less expensive area.
There were two apartments available in our existing building in
Belén, which we looked at but decided they didn’t meet our needs, as we
wanted to move to a larger apartment. We looked at a few other
apartments nearby in Belén, but we didn’t find one large enough that we
liked.
We also looked at a few apartments in
Bello in the
Niquia barrio near the
Puerta del Norte mall. We like this area, which is convenient to the metro and a large shopping mall as well as Exito and Euro grocery stores.
Niquia has several inexpensive apartments, but we didn’t find any larger apartments that we liked.
We also like the Sabaneta area. Sabaneta has many new apartment
buildings that have been built over the past few years, so it has many
apartments available to rent. We looked at seven apartments in Sabaneta
with my real estate agent and found one we liked.
We signed a lease for this apartment, but, unfortunately, the owner
changed his mind and was unsure about renting it, and we didn’t have
time to wait on this owner to make up his mind, so we looked at more
places in Sabaneta.
My real estate agent said he wanted to show us an apartment in
Sabaneta that he thought we would really like based on our comments
about other apartments, and he was right. We signed a year-long lease
the next day.
The apartment we found is located in a building that is less than a 10-minute walk to
Parque Sabaneta and less than a 10-minute walk to the
Aves Maria mall with a large Exito grocery store.
The Sabaneta metro station is located about a 20-minute walk away,
and an inexpensive bus route (1,700 pesos) to the metro station runs
right in front of our apartment building.
We also have found that three grocery stores in Sabaneta offer
domicilio (delivery) services: Euro, Supermercado Sabaneta and
Merkepaisa.
Parque Sabanta, located less than 10-minute walk from our apartment
Moving to the new apartment
We have some big pieces of furniture, plus a fridge and wash machine to move, so we wanted to use professional movers.
My real estate agent recommended a moving company, which we called.
This mover showed up as scheduled with a crew of three, and they took
about three and a half hours to pack up, drive to the new apartment and
unload.
The move was painless, nothing was damaged, and the cost was only 300,000 pesos ($112).
My fourth apartment specifications:
- Brand new, never been lived in before
- Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, about 110 square meters (1,184 square feet)
- Kitchen with granite countertops, oven, and gas cooktop
- Gas water heater (tankless)
- 10th floor in a high-rise building, with two balconies
- Pool, sauna and small gym in building
- 24×7 security
- Estrato 4 neighborhood
- Cost: 1,350,000 pesos per month, which is $503 per month at an average exchange rate of 2,685 pesos per USD
My real estate agent has offered to rent the apartment for another
year, so we plan to sign another lease to lock in the price for the
apartment another year.
View from one of the balconies in the apartment
The Bottom Line
With the recently improved exchange rate our new apartment in
Sabeneta costs less in terms of USD than the rent we paid over the past
two years for a 41 percent smaller apartment in Belén.
I fortunately have exchanged sufficient funds at an average exchange
rate of 2,685 pesos to the USD to enable paying another year of rent to
lock in $503 per month in rent for two years.
A similar sized (110 square meters) and similar quality unfurnished
three-bedroom apartment in El Poblado would likely rent for at least
1,800,000 pesos ($668) per month based on my earlier research and
confirmed by my real estate agent.
In El Poblado, a similar apartment would be at least 33 percent more
expensive. The bottom line is if you want to save money on apartments in
MedellÃn, you can save substantially by looking outside of El Poblado.
My other living costs will also be less expensive than if I lived in
El Poblado. Groceries are less expensive in Sabaneta and utilities are
less expensive compared to the mostly Estrato 6 neighborhoods in El
Poblado.
Plus pretty much everything else in Sabaneta we have discovered is
less expensive than in El Poblado, including restaurants, items in the
drugstores, and clothing and other items found in nearby stores.
