Beware of Mr Friend, he’s getting all your houses

Finding a rent in Reykjavík these days can be quite a serious business, and a rather stressful ordeal for your mental health. Be prepared to get acquainted with an implacable enemy, someone who has power over the mind of most Icelandic landlords and landladies. Be prepared to be at war with Mr Friend, the mysterious entity renting all the houses available on the market.

We had our own battle with Mr Friend. I’m thankful everything’s over, finally. We’ve been at war with him for three months. He made us aggravated, stressful, sad, very mad at anybody, and conscious of our limits as foreigners in Iceland. If you plan to find a long-term apartment for rent, you will very likely be at war with Mr Friend yourself, because he will make your quest very hard and frustrating. Sometimes life is so much easier for a tourist. All tourists have to do is putting their hand in their pocket; if you’re not a tourist sometimes even money, unless it’s crazy amounts of it, can’t really solve the problem. Mr Friend doesn’t care how rich you are, how reassuring your face looks, how good your references are. He just wants your house of choice, and nobody knows why.

After arriving in Reykjavík a few months ago, we had no other choice than staying at a guesthouse. We had no way to rent for a long period from Italy, we lacked basic requirements. We were residing at the guesthouse – for more than three months that was our home – and in the meantime we were looking for a long-term apartment. We payed our 3600 ISK for registration at Leigulistinn to be able to access their database for the Reykjavík area; we looked on other specialized sites like Leiga.is and mbl.is; we searched on local newspapers and read bulletin boards; we asked anybody we knew to keep their ears and eyes opened for us in case a good occasion presented itself. We wrote gazillions of emails to estate agents and landowners; we almost stalked them with our questions, in the hope we could more easily target houses we could be really interested in, instead of targeting any house at random. We tried to be as tolerant as possible when our questions were ignored for a reason or another, and we provided the most accurate information regarding our backgrounds and activities to make sure we didn’t appear in the eyes of the locals as shady foreigners nobody would entrust with their property. I have to say, sometimes we couldn’t get to the agreement phase because it wasn’t worth it. A lot of landowners would not offer a regular contract and would only accept to be paid in black money, which of course is very profitable for them but doesn’t provide any guarantee to the tenant. Some asked from four to six months in advance as initial payment, which is totally crazy in some cases, given the condition of the apartments and given the services included in the rent – a lot of rents include a few home appliances, like stove and fridge and sometimes washing machine, some others also electricity and heating and other expenses, so it’s always more convenient to look for those who offer an all-inclusive deal. Also, most houses for rent aren’t good. A lot of them are located in awful basements or are not in good conditions; you can be sure rental apartments are usually located in the worst buildings of the area they belong to. No wonder: of course Icelandic landowners aren’t stupid and they tend to keep the best houses to themselves and will rent only those houses they cannot inhabit or sell.

As I said, most of the times landowners ignored us and never replied to our messages. Other times, they got to the point of replying, some even to the point of showing us their houses for rent. In one case we  even got to the point of  a verbal agreement, but in the end you know what happened? Mr Friend got the house. Yes, he did. But who is, you are now wondering, this Mr Friend?

Mr Friend is everybody’s friend in Reykjavík. I’m not sure about the rest of Iceland, but there are chances he might have some connection outside the capital as well. Every Icelander with some sort of house to rent will at one point or another have to rent to Mr Friend and leave you out of the deal. You can be sure that in many cases, especially after taking the bother to go and take a look at the apartment, you’re going to receive a message from the landowner telling you, “I’m sorry, but a Friend of mine needs the apartment and I have to rent it to him.” Sometimes it’s not a friend, but a relative – of course Mr Friend must have a large family besides all his countless acquaintances, and he wants to live in their apartments as well.

One cannot blame Icelanders for being so cautious in choosing their tenants, especially at this moment. In this post-crisis period many people renting houses are simply people who bought an apartment when times seemed more favourable and then found themselves unable to pay off the bank loans for the house, because in the meantime those loans have doubled or tripled thanks to beyond control speculations – the same speculations leading to the bankrupt in 2008. These people have families to support with the money coming from those rents, they depend on it, and they cannot risk to find themselves in trouble at some point or another. Foreigners look most suspicious to them and not enough reliable: in their eyes even foreigners with a regular kennitala can disappear all of a sudden without leaving a trace. So it’s not that hard to understand Mr Friend has a priority over yourself when it comes to rent long-term apartments. What is absurd is most Icelanders are so afraid of admitting they do not like they idea of renting to a foreigner. They are all friendly and eager to help you on the outside, but they are looking for some way to get rid of you on the inside. Mr Friend is usually the best thing they can come up with once they realize they actually have no valid or politically correct reason to dismiss you.

In the end, we found a young man who decided we were OK to be his tenants. Young people, especially if they don’t have a family to support, are usually less wary of foreigners and more prone to entrust them with their property. Anyway, I don’t know why Mr Friend was so generous to leave this apartment for us to rent. Maybe he has too many houses he has to inhabit on rotation already.