Living in Lund Introduction Pt.2: The Perceived Connection between Apartment Hunting and Gambling

Following my experiences in Scotland, which you can read in Part 1 of this introduction, I thought private student accommodation companies were at least a portion of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I lived the last 3 years of my undergrad degree in private housing owned by members of the public with far more success than the sad run I had with Unite housing. So one can understand my reluctance to return to a mode of living requiring shared kitchens and having a large company be responsible for the paint on my walls. Still, my choices were as limited as my patience for the entire process.

AF Bostäder (AFB) is not quite the type of housing company you'd run into in the UK. They only operate in Lund, and according to their Twitter page they rent out around 6,000 apartments to students. This is by far the best chance for many people to get a place to live in Lund itself. Just as long as you endure the first hurdles of bureaucratic nonsense and waiting in desperation to hear any good news at all.

Getting to know AFB

Beginning your journey into living with AFB usually begins with a notification telling you the system signup is not open for you yet. Probably to give new potential residents a more equal footing in the application process, the AFB internet team does not open up the new applicant accounts until the first week of July. This would make sense, unless the system would be inherently based on a stringent "first come, first served" -principle.

The website at first does not even specify that you need to put your name down for specific open apartments. In fact, the term "lottery" is so pervasive on the site that you kinda feel like giving up immediately. I don't know about the average Swedish applicant, but I have yet to win in a lottery draw. In fact, "the lottery" conjures up images of once in a life time, life changing events that you only see on the news. I would have been more assured of my chances if it had been called the "Crash a Plane and Get Struck by Lightening the Same Day" -housing allocation principle. Furthermore, most lottery winners do not manage to hold onto their newly acquired wealth and usually end up poorer than they started. So what was I to make of this phrasing? Do they wish to convey the image that your time studying will actually destroy your life completely? But I digress....

Fortunately, calling the process a lottery is a complete misnomer. Your chances of getting a flat are apparently determined by when you signed up into the AFB system. As this became apparent, I was all ready to settle for flat hunting in Malmö, Stockholm, or a daily commute from Helsinki. Once I signed up for the system, the July "lottery" had been going on for a few days, meaning there were dozens, if not hundreds of people who had priority over me. Yet with a week of ticking boxes and trying to figure out what life choices I had made to deserve this ordeal, my queue numbers began to improve and after a week and a half I signed my contract online. Yes, they do all their paper work with online forms and it could not be easier for the client. Thus I can find it in my heart to forgive these wonderful people for their blatant misuse of the word "lottery", and the moments of hysterical panic.

So how does it work?

Figure 13. The AFB website lottery screen. GREEN CIRCLE: "N" denotes priority for new clients. BLUE OVAL: Top date is when apartment opened up for queuing, bottom date is the date when apartment will be offered to the first person in the queue. RED ARROW: In this column, you will find numbers showing your position in the queue and amount of people in the queue all in all.

You can queue for three apartments at once, and your queue number might change over time quite a bit. Usually it will grow as people jump in front of you especially for the single room apartments and cheaper corridor rooms. Yet as the people who signed up before you manage to secure apartments for themselves, your chances will improve too. The best bet is to check AFB.se when they open up the new application round for the upcoming semester, then fill in your application early that morning to get going right from the start.

As a complementary service, they arrange frequent online chat sessions to address tenants' problems directly. You do not even have to drag yourself to their HQ or incur criminally high phone bills by dialing in from abroad. What is severely lacking on the other hand is the amount of available pictures or testimonials of these apartments. To help this situation, Lund(on) Times will dedicate a portion of its content (okay, probably all of it seeing how active I am with blogging to begin with) to reviewing and interviewing the AFB student apartments across town. As long as nobody files an injunction against me, I will bring you cellphone quality photos from the apartments and surrounding areas, along interview testimonials from individuals living in them currently. Hopefully this will prove as a useful service, and more importantly a much needed resuscitation for this overreaching piece of amateur journalism...