Moving to a new city, especially from another country, is a big deal. There is so much basic local knowledge that you won’t have and can’t always get just by having a look online. It doesn’t help that the property market in Frankfurt is so fast moving. On the one hand, its great that there are so many properties available to rent, but they also go so quickly that if you aren’t here in person and ready to move in quickly, you end up missing out.

The obvious solution is to arrive in the city, stay somewhere shortterm and use the time to get used to the districts before you find your perfect home! This is exactly what I did when I first came to Frankfurt: first night in a hotel so that I was in the right place on a Sunday so that I could start work the next day. The second day though, I moved straight into a serviced apartment and stayed there for 3 months until I found a long term place. Admittedly, I didn’t need three months, but since I had booked it, I was lazy and didn’t do any flat searching until the second month. But once I started looking, I had somewhere agreed within a couple of weeks. Once you are here, everything moves very quickly, so you need to be ready to view and apply on the same day. Which is why overseas applicants are always missing out.

I won’t go too much into finding longterm accommodation to rent or to buy other than that pretty much everything you need to know is on Immoscout24, the main place to go for property listings. The main challenge is how to bridge the gap between arriving in Frankfurt and finding your new home, especially if you don’t have the luxury of a company that takes care of everything for you, or family and friends locally you can lean on.

Serviced apartments

I don’t need to explain how to book a hotel, booking.com is well known to everyone by now. But realistically, you won’t find a hotel or apartment on there for much under €100 a night, especially if a large conference is going on. Or more importantly, you won’t find somewhere under €100 a night that you are willing to stay in for more than a couple of nights. Given the fact that most of us will be on some sort of reasonable budget, staying in a hotel is both unsustainable especially if you don’t know exactly how long you will be staying and also stressful not being able to cook and have some personal space.

Airbnb is also a perfectly acceptable option. There are some nice places in the city and spacious options slightly outside in the Taunus area. I use Airbnb a lot when I am on holiday and staying for a week or two, and its great. Good value, spacious, and you can treat it like home. But, there is always a bit of an issue with laundry, longer stays which not all landlords are happy about, and you are still in someone else’s home. And the prices are ok, probably about €1600-€2000 a month for a 2 person apartment. If you need to get an invoice though for work, this isn’t the option for you though.

Which brings us to professional and serviced apartments. slightly more expensive than Airbnb, but desinged to be let out to longer term residents. I liked this option specifically because I wasn’t in someone’s home, and I was able to use the invoice at the end of the year to claim tax back. Also the bookings are specifically geared towards mid-term residents of one month or more. In Frankfurt, there are certainly individual buildings and companies that have a range of rooms available, but it can be a bit of a pain looking, enquiring and finally booking a room. But luckily there are two sites collating the offerings of multiple providers that I would recommend checking out. Both have good TrustPilot scores (above 4 stars at time of writing):

Homelike – Homelike is the more professional of the two sites, only offering professional apartments (specifically furnished for longterm bookings). They have over 600 rooms inside Frankfurt from a range of different providers The link above is to the Frankfurt pre-filtered search and when I had a look, there are 841 options available in Frankfurt and surrounding towns. Importantly, Homelike aren’t offering accomodation themselves, they are just a booking site. They have a minimum 1 month booking time and prices seem to start at €1600, although the cheaper rooms are pretty small (20sqm).

Wunderflats – This second option is slightly smaller with only 300 rooms in Frankfurt at the moment. They slightly different from Homelike in that they have a mixture of private homes and serviced apartments. But this is clearly labeled on the site so you know what you are booking. The prices are roughly the same, but you get a little more space on the private apartments since these are people listing their own homes.

Student accommodation

If you are looking at all of these prices and thinking it is too expensive on a student budget, then you would be right, it is! The average cost of a regular apartment in Frankfurt is between €1000-€1600 (warm/including service charges) so the short term rentals are generally about 25% higher. If you are on a student budget, you need to be thinking in the region of €450 to €800 monthly depending on how luxurious you want it. All of the universities have an accommodation office, but if you aren’t having any luck with the official accommodation options, then head on over to WG-Gesucht. This is the place for all privately listed student digs, including those in a shared apartment (so-called ‘WG’, Wohngemeinschaft or communal living). There are a few super cheap options at €300 a month, but these are very limited timeframes, probably while someone is doing an exchange semester. But generally they start at €500 a month. Cheaper than this are available through the universities and require proof of financial need. But this is a topic for another time…