When I was looking for a rental in Bratislava with friends a long, long time ago, like 2 lifetimes ago, I felt like nothing worse could possibly happen to me. How many of you will live here? What is your relationship? Will you throw student parties? Half-jokingly, half-seriously, after my umpteenth unsuccessful attempt, I started grumbling that pretty soon they'd be asking for the color of my underwear.

I had no idea what awaited me one day in Canada.

We started looking for our new home while still in Slovakia. We mostly looked for rentals via Rentals, as this site seemed the most user-friendly to us and at the same time, it is one of the main real estate portals in Canada. If any of you watch the NHL, they sometimes have ads on the boards ;). The advantage of Rentals is that all listings are on an interactive map, so you can immediately see where you are within the city. Not all housing types are common in Slovakia, or rather, not all exist back home. Sooo.. 3.. 2.. 1 quick crash course on the real estate market:

Studio = garzónka
Bachelor = an even smaller garzónka
Duplex = a house divided into 2 separate apartments
Multi-unit = a house divided into multiple apartments
Townhouse = terraced housing, you have the whole house to yourself, but share walls with neighbors
Basement = cellar. Careful, don't imagine your grandpa's cellar with potatoes and preserves. Basements are a thing here. Most family houses here have a basement and it is either finished or unfinished. You (hopefully) won't find those unfinished ones for rent separately, because they are classic cellars where you just put a washing machine or a boiler room. You might sometimes encounter the term "unfinished basement" when renting entire family homes. Our Airbnb, where we unfortunately stayed the first few days, had a textbook unfinished basement (yes, I was scared to go down there in case some boogeyman jumped out at me):

Basement of horrors.

A Finished basement, on the other hand, is an entire, fully functional floor of a family house underground. If there weren't windows at a weird height, you might not even realize you're underground :) Of course, not everyone likes looking at the ankles of passers-by all day or having the landlords walking over their heads, which is why basements are usually very cost-effective.

In Slovakia, we lived in a house, so logically we looked at those first. We had romantic visions of renting some small house with a little garden, where Foxi could run out to pee anytime and where we'd host BBQs with the neighbors. Of course, little birds would chirp to us, and if not moose, then at least raccoons would come say goodnight. We quickly woke up from our naivety.

First of all, North American houses are designed completely differently. Like everything, most houses here are gigantic. You can commonly find 5 or 6 room houses for rent. Here I will take the liberty to add a small translator's note, that "5 bedroom" here literally means 5 bedrooms (rooms), while the living room doesn't count. So in our parts, a 5-bedroom house is actually a 6-room house. And those are already promoted on real estate portals as multi-generational housing :D

And the more rooms, the more bathrooms there are. Like, do we seriously need to have at least 5 bathrooms in a 6-bedroom house? Does every member have their own dedicated toilet and shower or what? I don't know how you feel about it, but I hate cleaning from the bottom of my soul, and for something like this, I would need a charming cleaning lady, or a cleaning man for that matter, bundled with the house. I'd really be interested to know how a regular family manages to maintain such a behemoth, considering everyone is outside on the weekends here. Our house was far from a hacienda, and we could easily spend an entire Saturday maintaining it. Who knows, maybe they have some secret life hack here that I haven't figured out yet. If it exists, I hope they reveal it to me when I receive my Canadian passport ;).

(My secret personal guess is that many people here can genuinely afford a cleaning service, and even if they can't, they just don't stress over cleaning that much.)

Secondly, even when we clicked through those gargantuan properties and found something size-appropriate for two adults and a dog, within our set budget, all the houses had some problem. Either they were significantly worn out, completely unfurnished (even lacking kitchen cabinets), or they were in the middle of nowhere, far, far away from any urban infrastructure. Or, and this was the most common case, a combination of all the mentioned factors. The houses that passed through this filter started somewhere around 5000 CAD, so access denied.

At this point, we were already leaning towards an apartment, but ultimately, the realization of a simple truth decided it - a house and garden need to be maintained, and so far we are here for a year. Do we want to spend our weekends mowing the lawn and running around the house, or do we want to explore Canada? The answer is probably clear.

So we checked the new Apartments category on Rentals and discovered America. Literally. We found out that, unlike in Slovakia, "apartment buildings" here are conceived as communities, and besides fulfilling the basic human need for housing, they offer all sorts of extra perks. By perks, you can imagine things like: social rooms, game rooms, movie rooms (pseudo-cinemas), a pool and/or a hot tub, a gym, a dog wash station, coworking space, grills for rent, a rooftop terrace with seating, a squash court, and we even saw a "panelák" (apartment block) with a fully equipped DIY workshop. Ours doesn't have a residents' workshop, which makes Miško really sad :)

And yes, it's included in the rent.

Our excitement started to soar and we tried reaching out to a few developer projects. Here it's necessary to explain the difference between developers and private individuals. A developer rents out the entire apartment building to individual tenants and usually has a dedicated team for this - Leasing Agents. The role of these agents is to do property tours, address questions and concerns of potential applicants, and close contracts. In such residential buildings, apartments generally cannot be bought at all. When renting from a private individual, you communicate directly with the owner or a real estate agent and rent the property they own. Typically, when it comes to an apartment, it's just one of many within a specific building. So, very similar to what you know from Slovakia.

Why did we approach developers and not private owners? We wanted to treat ourselves a bit regarding the standard of living, and at the same time, we were looking for a location in the broader city center for walking access to the LRT (city trains, Ottawa doesn't have a metro). Many private rentals don't meet these conditions. Another specific but essential condition for us was that pets were allowed. As our neighbor later explained, Ontario FORBIDS denying a rental solely on the grounds that the potential tenant has a pet. In practice, developers abide by this legislation, but in private listings, we found a ton of properties where the owner didn't accept pets. And where would we go to argue? To the complaint department?

Besides that, due to Covid, the construction of residential buildings slowed down significantly, and many of them are being completed now, in rapid succession. Except—and this is an extreme problem in Ottawa—a ton of people fled the city for family homes during the pandemic and don't want to return to in-person jobs anymore (freedom, oh sweet freedom). So developers have to deal with immense competitive pressure and a lack of applicants. Leasing Agents, whom I mentioned above, routinely work six days a week. They literally trip over each other to offer better amenities and rent discounts (often the lease is signed for 14 months but you only pay for 12). JACKPOT!

Or is it?

It would have been a win for us too, if we didn't have the label Newcomers in Canada stamped on our foreheads. All the agents we contacted were extremely nice, helpful, enthusiastic, and replied instantly. Until the topic came to the documents required to sign a lease. This is approximately the standard required in various combinations: a credit score report, an employment contract and/or a few pay stubs, and 2 references from previous landlords. Guess which of these we had?

While you think about the answer to my tricky question, I'll briefly explain the Credit Score. I've promised to do so at least four times already ;). A Credit Score is the local equivalent of our credit registry. All your financial transactions (such as credit card movements, mortgage payments, loan applications) either increase or decrease your Credit Score. The maximum is 900 points, and you need a minimum of 700 to be evaluated as a reliable tenant/debtor. The easiest way to start building your Credit Score is to use a credit card. But beware! Even if you have, say, a limit of 1000 CAD, you shouldn't use all of it - ideally, you should use about 30% of the limit each month and then, of course, pay it off on time. If you use your entire credit card limit, you'll seem too dependent on the bank. If you don't use the card, there will be no records of whether you pay your bills all at once. Another way to build a Credit Score is to lease a car - but here the Newcomer crashes again on the fact that no one will give them a lease because they don't have a Credit Score. Who else sees Catch-22 here? :)

Of course, as foreigners, we had no Credit Score - not that we had a bad one, no. We just had a 0. A blank piece of paper. And at the same time, in many cases, an insurmountable problem.

At this point, the agents would usually ask for an employment contract as proof of income. Which, of course, we also didn't have, and pay stubs even less so. And even if we had a contract, they would first have to calculate whether our income could even cover such rent. As a last resort, they would usually suggest a Cosigner. Who is this mythical creature? Essentially, it's a rental guarantor (to be fair to Canadian landlords, we later found out that Canadian students usually also need to list their parents as Cosigners if they don't earn enough for rent themselves). But it can't just be anyone - it has to be a Canadian citizen with their own Credit Score of at least 800 and with sufficient income to cover our entire rent, in addition to their own living expenses, if we stop paying.

And now tell me, where the hell were the two of us supposed to find such a person when we were just getting ready to move to Canada? Well, our problem, not the landlord's.

After another endless email exchange on the topic of WeDontHaveACreditScoreOrACosigner, our nervous systems were heavily exhausted. And that's when Miško suggested: "You know what, send them an account statement so they can see we have the money." So I did, and yaay, smileys were flying in the emails and we became interesting tenants. Ultimately, we managed to agree with our current property manager that we could rent the apartment on the condition that we pay the entire year's rent in advance.

Did you choke on your coffee just now? I understand. It's certainly not the optimal solution. However, we were lucky that we could afford to pay such an amount. Either way, leases are signed for a minimum of a year, and the cost comes out exactly the same. And what probably weighed the most - we were stressed out enough from the whole emigration process and we simply didn't want to keep dragging it out with XY more developers, trying to find that one needle in a haystack who would accommodate us. Simply put, because these are companies and not private individuals, they have their spreadsheets where they need to tick off certain boxes, and based on that, they either talk to you or they don't. Just corporate things.

Of course, we could have continued. We could have kept looking for private landlords, who usually ask for these documents too, but there is at least some chance they would be understanding and take pity on immigrants from some godforsaken country. Sure we could have. But I dare say very few people would be capable of and willing to do what we did - we really came here with one suitcase and a dog crate. It wasn't worth the stress and bouncing around random Airbnbs to us; we simply needed a permanent place to live as soon as possible. Here, an awful lot of things are tied to your Canadian address, including the address on your driver's license (which has the status of an ID card here, so you must report address changes). However, I also understand that not everyone has this option - therefore, if I were to give one piece of advice regarding housing - look for private rentals.

And since I know people are curious creatures, before I say goodbye for this week, I'll share a few more impressions from our first month in our new place. I'll reveal that we live in the Hintonburg neighborhood - supposedly the most hipster (no, this wasn't our goal, it just happened that way) and the most dog-friendly part of the city. We are a 5-minute walk to the Ottawa River, and also 5 minutes to a large public transit hub, where a bunch of bus routes and the LRT line run.

Our residential project is just right before the finish line, so there are very few residents for now. Woohoo, at least no one bothers us in the gym :)

*Nice, new, modern, sweet-smelling gym accessible to tenants 24/7.*

*Those who aren't into cardio can go crazy with the weights.*

*Yoga room, also accessible 24/7. When more of us live here, we will (supposedly) have yoga classes right in the building.*

Unfortunately, since the building isn't 100% finished yet and many things are still being finalized, we run into all sorts of funny or less-than-funny surprises. For example, today at eight in the morning, the fire alarm went off... just because. And yes, in an over 30-story building, it went off exactly on our floor and one above. Magical.

When something like this happens to us, we can turn to a few people. The first one is the Concierge - which is actually a very nice name for a receptionist. The Concierge is available to us from eight in the morning to midnight, and we can call him via the intercom directly from our apartment without poking our precious little noses out the door. They help with all sorts of things - for example, for the more normal people who move here with some furniture, they can reserve the freight elevator for a specific time to avoid holding up other tenants. They don't take packages for us, though - that's what the SnaileBox is for, which you can imagine as an AlzaBox* right inside the building. It works with all courier services and even for private individuals - if someone wanted to leave you a gift, they put it in the SnaileBox and the recipient gets a notification via an internal app that they have a package. Very clever, especially when you are furnishing a household and ordering like crazy.

The second person is the Building Operator, basically a property manager who is in charge of all practical matters and building maintenance. In our case, he's a guy whose hair probably stands on end whenever he sees a ticket from me (oh well, someone has to catch these early bugs). Yes, you read that right, a ticket. As soon as something breaks in our apartment, or we notice some mischief in the common areas, we enter a request into the system and maintenance solves it. Nice and easy, just like when you can't log into something at work and you write a ticket to IT.

And the third person is the Residents Experience Coordinator. Essentially an animator for tenants :) I'm oversimplifying a lot right now, of course, but it really is this lady's primary job to make sure we are happy and satisfied here. Besides that, we also found out she loves dogs, so naturally, Foxinka is numero uno here and we are just two accessories. I'm kidding... or am I ;) ?

After we moved in, she not only brought us a welcome gift, but also invited us to a grand opening party with a DJ and drinks in the shared pool area. It's planned for June as part of the building's Grand Opening, so hopefully they'll have the pool finished by then!

We both grew up in honest, old-school socialist apartment blocks, where unless you absolutely had to, you didn't talk to your neighbors. And of course, whatever happened behind someone else's front door was none of your business. So, living here, we often feel—at best—like Alice in Wonderland. At worst, like two Neanderthals. 🙂

So we're giving ourselves a little pat on the back, because it seems we made a pretty good choice when it came to our new home. And we hope everyone who's currently struggling to find the right place to live has the same luck. It doesn't matter whether it's in Slovakia, Canada, or anywhere else in the world.

The view from our kitchen overlooks downtown Ottawa and Canada's Parliament. Honestly, I'm not sure where we'd have to move to find a better view.

Author’s note:

AlzaBox - Alza is one of the largest e-commerce retailers in Slovakia and Central Europe, and their bright green, automated parcel lockers (AlzaBoxes) are ubiquitous on almost every street corner there.

On Apartment Hunting

On Life in Canada - Part Two: Joys