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How to succeed finding a place to rent on Blocket

Finding a room or apartment to rent in Stockholm can be an extremely difficult task.
We will show you how to succeed using Blocket.

Blocket: Your best friend and your worst nightmare

In Blocket you can find a lot of properties posted everyday, but there is also a lot of people applying to get them so you have to be smart to get a rental there.


Understanding the landlord point of view

We decided to ask a lot of landlords about their personal experience and we learned how they choose tenants:

After posting their apartment or room they will start to receive a lot of applications, with a lot we mean around 50 emails in the first hour for an interesting property (i.e. any apartment below 8.000 SEK falls in this definition).

They feel completely overwhelmed so they just go through the first emails trying to find somebody that looks like a great tenant.

Then, they reply only to these few lucky flat hunters, the rest will not receive any answer.

He was using Blocket, True Story.

The “wrong” way to use Blocket

So based on this, if you just check Blocket when you arrive home after work and apply for all the flats or rooms posted today you are going to be “late” for most of them.

You need to apply no later than 30 minutes (ideally 5 minutes) after the property was posted or nobody is going to see your email.

Doing that you will know that the landlord sees your application. Now you need to get their attention with a compelling application:

Imagine that you are renting out your home, you are scared to death because somebody is going to live in the place you care the most about!!!, You want some information about this future tenant that calms you down.

Then you see an email like this:
- "Hi, my name is Joe, I like your apartment, can I see it? , Thanks."

You have another 100 emails waiting in the inbox, some of them well crafted emails with a lot of information about this future tenant, would you answer instead this guy?


The “right” way to use Blocket

Ok, now that we have the basics defined, it’s easy to define a solution, you just need 2 things:
  • Apply as fast as possible
  • Write a compelling application
To apply as fast as possible you should check Blocket at least every half an hour.
I know, I know this is just nuts, but this is what it is, sorry.


And for the compelling application, well, just keep reading ;)



Last but not least: Write a compelling application

Ok, now that the landlord is going to read your email because you were really fast, we need to get his attention!

No worries, we wrote a dedicated blog post about this.

But as a rule of thumb: If you were going to rent your apartment, what information would you like to know about the future tenant?
- Now you know what to write.