Bumps Along the Rental Road

Renting an apartment here is not as simple as saying, “Yep, looks good, I’ll take it.” You have to submit a written offer, which includes your proposed term of lease, monthly rate, proposed amount of deposit, and any repairs which need to be done before your move-in. You also have to provide tax records and proof of income.

If you don’t have three years of Portuguese tax records (US doesn’t count, FICO score is worthless here), you may have to pay more than the legally required amount of deposit (we had one owner who wanted a year paid in advance) or have a guarantor co-sign.

The good news is that rents are often negotiable. It’s not unheard of for the price to come down by hundreds of Euros. You also have the ability to ask for modifications to the apartment.

Once the landlord accepts the proposal, a rental contract is drawn up. And here’s where things can get surprising messy.

The first place we were interested in, the owner accepted our proposal, but there was evidently some confusion about move-in dates – they expected us to move two months earlier than we planned. We reached a compromise, which was going to result in us having an overlap at our old place, but, hey, we really liked the place.

Then, they started asking for all sorts of extra deposits and prepayments – even though I’m Portuguese, they had rented to foreigners previously and had evidently gotten burned. OK, no problem – we actually have the money, so we can do that.

And then, they refused to allow the lease to be in my company name … Portugal is different from the US in that here I can write off the entire monthly payment if it’s a company expense. Not renting in the company name defeats the whole purpose.

Despite the fact that this is a normal practice, despite the fact that both realtors tried to convince them to change their minds, the owners wouldn’t budge, so we walked away from this deal.

The second place we were interested in was a beauty – some of you saw pictures of it. It was a refurbished flat in an Art Nouveau building, and the owner was the architect. A problem was that it didn’t come with parking, but the owner told us we could rent parking from the hotel next door (although he was a bit vague on pricing …).

There was also no heat or air, although all the preinstallation work was done. The owner agreed to install the system if we would agree to move in a month earlier than our target date. That seemed reasonable, so we agreed. We made a slightly reduced offer to compensate for having to rent parking, and he accepted it, so the offer went to contract. And here’s where things got messy again!

In reading through the contract, I found the clause where pets were not allowed. This was crazy – our realtor knows we have pets, their realtor knows we have pets, the OWNER knew we had pets because we talked to him about them. After two or three days of back-and-forth discussion, the owner agreed to change the contract, but the whole thing felt kind of adversarial.

Plus, I had started calling around to ask about renting a parking space and was getting very conflicting information. Since the hotel next door was actually closed due to COVID, I contacted the parent company. One person told me that there was parking only for guests, one person told me that they could get me parking at another branch of the hotel a few blocks away … and the nearest official parking lot with actual posted prices was more than twice what the owner had implied.

We walked away from this deal, too.

Next episode: Third time’s the charm