Renting in the U.K. has been a wild ride. It’s not nearly as easy as it is in the U.S. and it isn’t due to us being foreigners, it’s just how things are done. In the U.S. you either go apartment hunting or, if you’re in the market for a house, you find a real estate agent who can show you any of the places you’re interested in; It’s a fairly cut and dry process.

Being total newcomers, we chose to start our hunt by using two apps, Zoopla and Rightmove. Before we even got to London it was a fun way to spend some idle time, wishing our budget was in the tens of thousands so we could live in an old, drafty castle. Months later, and after an exhausting in-person search, I was told that many times when a property goes live on an app it already has an agreed upon offer which was frustrating.

While that was frustrating what really was the most frustrating was scheduling a viewing of a property. In the U.K. a property is listed with one agency (sometimes more but for our purposes, it’s only one). Each agency can have many different offices throughout the 32 greater London boroughs which are also broken down into neighborhoods. Only an agent who works in the neighborhood office of where the property is located can show the property. Considering the fact that you’re using an app to blindly select properties that look nice and tick all the boxes you’re most definitely going to end up working with multiple agents in multiple locations.

Adding to all of this is our utter lack of London neighborhood knowledge. Marcus and I set some guidelines when we started our online search, such as proximity to work, school, and mass transit but until our feet were on the ground we really had no idea what the vibe of an area would be. Many of the neighborhoods we looked at can best be described as “gritty” which is when I came to the conclusion that I really am not a city girl (unless said city is Singapore which is the opposite of gritty). It was an agent who finally clued me in that if a High Street (aka Main Street) had a Gail’s Bakery it was sure to be a posh neighborhood. Considering I identify as posh I found this to be very helpful.

Aside from not being interested in living on streets that were named “Shoot-up Hill” (check out this interesting article for more information about the names of London roads) we had only a tiny list of living requirements: A garden (or in ‘Merican a “yard”) and pet friendly. After our first few viewings I realized I had to expand the list to also include a dishwasher and a washing machine/dryer combo as must-haves because while washing machines are pretty standard, a dishwasher and/or a separate dryer are not. I am seriously flummoxed by the lack of dryers in a country that is rainy 65% of the time. Like, how do clothes get dry?!

So it was, that after the girls and I had seen no less than a dozen different homes and about as many different neighborhoods, I made the decision to look just a bit farther out from central London. Going off the Gail’s Bakery insider tip and the newfound desire to not live near central London, we made our way to a quiet little town nearly 20 miles from the center of London, immediately fell in love, and put an offer on a home that very day.

Making an offer on a rental property was another different aspect of renting in the U.K. versus the U.S. In the U.S. the only time we make an offer on a property is when we purchase a home. I don’t know if it’s due to a supply and demand problem, but it seems like a well-established thing that you put in an offer for the rental amount of your choosing and the landlord can either accept it or not. If the landlord accepts your offer, you then must go through a background check (which is kind of interesting having a total lack of a “background” in the U.K.), as the renter you can ask for any other requirements you may have (our number one ask was if we could have pets), and also include a profile of the people who will be living in the home (Fair Housing Act who?). Once we had accomplished all of those things, and we and the landlord were satisfied, we signed on the dotted line.

As of the fifty-millionth iteration of this post, we have been in the house for just over one week and I believe Marcus’s almost exact words were, “I’m really glad for the choice to not live in the city.” A high complement, indeed. Of course, one of the problems of living in the ‘burbs is that both of our children have social lives with friends who don’t live nearby, and I must be the chauffeur again which doesn’t bode well for my anxiety.