Our this week’s featured rental is an example of a perfect alternative to a hotel – a serviced apartment that is available for short term renting. Too bad the minimum stay is 90 days. Otherwise it would be perfect for us. Via Refresh Accommodation:

2-4 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London, SW7 5EW
*Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea
Bedrooms: 2, max occupancy 4
Size: 1,195 Sq. ft
Minimum stay: 90 days
Price: £1351,25 per week

Traditionally styled, with floor-to-ceiling windows, sculptured ceilings with beautiful chandeliers, original fireplaces and individually chosen artwork. En-suite bedroom, study areas, fully equipped top-of-the-range kitchens, living rooms and separate dining rooms.

Apartment facilities & services:
- Daily maid service (Mon – Fri)
- Fully fitted Miele kitchens and appliances
- Rental of two direct telephone lines; answer phone
- DVD and stereos
- Air conditioning
- Villeroy and Boch china and crystal glassware
- Wireless broadband available
- Telephone line rental and voicemail
- Porterage is available seven days a week
- Same day dry cleaning and laundry for added charge
- Additional premium satellite channels for added charge
- Theatre bookings

See the full ad here.

You have to read this article from Times Online if you are looking for a rental. There are some good tips on which real estate portals to use on the web. It is also a great promotional article for Globrix. News International Group, the owner of Times, has invested in the new real estate search engine.

Artemi has left us a good comment:

You should have tried this search on DotHomes:

http://www.dothomes.co.uk/rent?q=%22short%20let%22%20london

The good thing about using a real estate search engine, is that you can be sure that you don’t have to rely on the given search options. You can put anything into the search box, including short let london. So that’s an option for you to use, when you are looking for something specific Like a short term rental. The search engines are very simple to use and when you need more details, you’ll usually get straight to the source with just one click on the listing. Here’s a screenshot of DotHomes:

Here is a list of real estate search engines you can use in London:
DotHomes
Globrix
Nestoria
Zoomf

Update on our search for short term rental.

We have put together an initial final list of the apartments, and are now trying to make it shorter by surfing the web for some advice. What are the typical mistakes made when choosing a short term/holiday/vacation rental? Are there any companies that we should avoid? We found this from New York Habitat and on how to avoid scams:

Use caution when using sites like Craig’s List and other classified pages. Though the majority of the offers on these sites are legitimate, a significant portion of the offers are scams and there is no prescreening on these sites. These sites can be helpful in finding a local broker, as many reputable brokers, including New York Habitat, advertise on sites like these.

We’ve found a great site called Refresh Accommodation. There are plenty of apartments to our taste that are available for a short stay in London:

Draycott Place, Chelsea: 2-bed £164 per night LINK
36 Draycott Place, Chelsea: 2-bed £1645 per week LINK
No. 1 Sloane Avenue, Chelsea: 2-bed £1292,50 per week LINK
Cheval Apartments, Knightsbridge: 2-bed £ 1868,25 per week LINK

Most of the apartments provide wireless Internet & maid service.

Do you feel green to the bone? Here’s a place you could rent a house at – the BedZED community in Wallington, London Borough of Surrey. The Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) is the UK-s largest carbon-neutral eco-community that was built in 2000-2002. There are 82 houses, 17 apartments, and 1,405 m² of workspace.  There is a strong emphasis on roof gardens, sunlight, solar energy, reduction of energy consumption, and waste water recycling. The development is built from natural, recycled, and reclaimed materials.

If you are interested – Green Moves has a listing for a 4-bedroom terraced house to let for £1350 per month.

Via & Image: Inhabitat

A few facts from the annual UK housing review by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and the Building Societies Association (BSA):

- High mortgage costs have forced more people to turn to the rental market
- Renters now pay almost 1/3 less than the mortgage repayments on the same property
- Rents increased 19 per cent in 2007
- Rents increased 8 per cent in the last quarter of the year 2007
- The total annual return for buy-to-let property was 21 per cent in 2007

Via Financial Times

So many sites, so little time! I have spent half the weekend searching for an apartment to rent in London for 10 days (requirements here). From the websites listed in this post, I could not find anything suitable. And it is not that I am too fussy, it is just that there was not much choice in the areas that we are looking in. So far HolidayLettings.co.uk has had the most offers. 14 results for 2-bedrooms in central London, and 4 in the desired locations Kensington, Knightsbridge & Chelsea. The average rent for those 2-bed apartments in central London is £571-1550 per week. Here’s one example:

Harcourt Terrace , Chelsea, London Sw10
2-Bedroom flat
Furnished, with all the necessary appliances
Deposit – 1 weeks rent in advance
Rent £950 per week

I also found a sleek looking site, CityBaseApartments.com, which is owned by a travel accommodation company. 66 results for central London and 20 results for 2-bedroom in the desired areas. The prices are a tad higher here. £186-445 per night for a 2-bed in Kensington & Earls Court. In Knightsbridge & Chelsea £162-687 per night. Here’s one example:

9 Manson Place, South-Kensington, London SW7
2-Bedroom apartment
Weekly Maid Service/Housekeeping
Weekly Linen Change
Rent £264 per night

We have also received an interesting offer from an agent at Andre Lanauvre. She is yet to confirm the availability for the time period requested but the apartment is in SW7 and costs £2000 per week. We have to sit down with Anouschka to see if it would make our finals.

***

Hope to get the final list together by tomorrow afternoon. If you have any comments or suggestions, do let us know!

ARLA says that they are launching a new Tenancy Deposit Scheme website on February the 3rd. We, too, should spend some time on raising the awareness. But right now, if you have no idea what the Tenancy Deposit Scheme means – do some reading at Shelter’s TDS page. From 6 April 2007, all deposits (for rent up to £25,000 per annum) taken by landlords and letting agents for Assured Shorthold Tenancies in England and Wales, must be protected by a tenancy deposit protection scheme.

Illustrative image: Wordspan Creative

We realize at this point that the regular estate agents’ “short term” too often means 1-6 months. So we have decided to make our search more specific and change the keywords in Google & Yahoo from “short term rent london” into “holiday rent london” or “vacation rentals london”.

Here is what we found:

HolidayLettings.co.uk We saw the link in one of the biggest real estate portals Rightmove.co.uk.

ServicedLets.com

Rentalo.com

HolidayRentals.org

Holiday-rentals.co.uk

Apartments Apart

This is the first batch we’re browsing at the moment. If you know a site we could use to find an apartment to rent in London for a short period of time (10 days), you are more than welcome to post it in the comments or you can also E-mail us at: info [at] royalsofrent.com.

PS! You can leave us comments anonymously!

We are so much wiser after talking to Foxtons estate agency today. Here’s what we learned:

The minimum stay at their short let is 1 month. You won’t be left on the street if you want the rental for 10 days only but it will be just as expensive as one month’s stay. So Foxtons Short Lets service is mainly used by people who have just moved to London (and want to get to know the market before buying property), by firms that need an alternative to a hotel, and by media companies renting for making adverts or films.

Here’s a short fact list of what Foxtons Short Lets means:

• Quite a bit of choice – Click here to browse their short lets in London.
• Minimum stay: 1 month
• Costs: 1 month’s rent in advance + 4 weeks deposit + Foxtons fee
  Bills are included in the rent (usually excluding telephone & Internet)
• A good Tenancy Agreement protecting both, the tenant and the landlord
• The short let is managed
• There is no charge for viewings
• The lettings negotiator can drive you to the viewings

We also found out that at Foxtons each prospective tenant gets an Account Manager. He is then the person you’ll be talking to during the process of your search for a suitable rental. He will be, so to say – holding your hand, writing down your wishes, appointing you to letting negotiators who will show you the rentals, etc.

We hereby send greetings to Foxtons Account Manager Richard, who was most helpful!

***

We are now browsing holiday lettings websites in London. Stay tuned!

We’ve received feedback from the agents already. Foxtons sent us their short lets introductory brochure as well, which you can see here. We will be speaking to them over the phone shortly.

PS! Don’t forget to add your telephone number to your E-mail when you are contacting an agent, even if you are calling from abroad.

Image: Foxtons Short Lets

As part of our short term rental apartment search, we are looking for an agent who can help us. Why are we not browsing offers on websites first? Mainly because we do not have time to go through all of them right away. Also because we do not know much about the short term or holiday lettings business, so we are approaching it the same way we would in case of regular lettings. We’ll hopefully find out the best way at the end of our quest.

Where we looked, while searching for an agent who deals with short term rentals:

1. Real Estate Websites Net-Lettings.co.uk, FindaProperty.com, HotProperty, Rightmove.co.uk, Propertyfinder, PrimeLocation
3. Association Websites ARLA, NAEA
5. Search Engine Google.co.uk

Real Estate Websites
While most of the real estate portals sport an agent list, not all the bigger sites have the option to sort out short let agent list. FindaProperty.com actually has one, giving us 26 estate agents for Knightsbridge, for example. Here are the first 5 on the list: 1. Andre Lanauvre International Property 2. Direct Residential 3. Imperial Homes Parked at FindaProperty.com – no website? 4. Greenwood Asset Management 5. Plaza Estates.
Net-Lettings.co.uk has a list of links to agents websites. In Rightmove.co.uk (sort in rent search) and PrimeLocation you can browse the short lets list (add short let keyword), and then see which agents appear most often. HotProperty and PropertyFinder did not seem to have the option to sort out short lets.

Association Websites
ARLA won’t let you sort out agents who deal with short term rentals. You can search for a specific agent, by county, district or town and by London Borough or area. Compared to NAEA site, at least the members search results give you the their homepage link.
NAEA does not let you sort out agents who deal with short lets. Noticed that their agent search gives 6 results for Chelsea? The list does not have any links to agents’ websites.

Search Engine
Google.co.uk keywords inserted: short.let agent Results:
2 paid advertisements in front, then Britainexpress links to sites, Foxtons agent, MarshandParsons agent, Rent-Let-Vivastreet ads, FindaProperty.com list of agents

As a result of this small research, we’ve found enough agents to choose from. The choice is actually quite random, as we have not done much of research on the firms. It’s basically come down to who has their ad at the right place and how well their ads are displayed for dummies like us:

1. Andre Lanauvre International Property Ltd. The ad in FindaProperty.com sure does pay off!
2. Foxtons Keyword Kensington gives 110 results in short let category!!! Impressive.
3. Direct Residential 7 results for SW3, the most expensive postcode in London

These are the firms we will contact with out short term letting inquiry. Next stop – searching the web for sites with short term rentals in London and then browsing through them.

If you’ve just jumped on board, you should also read:
24.01.2008 Short Term Rental Search: Action Plan
23.01.2008 1st Open Search Begins: Short Term rental

From LandlordZone’s letting agents directory:

No More Estate Agents – No More Estate Agents offers a way to sell your house without using estate agents. You can advertise your house direct to buyers through the website.

That was one brave name. The site is now closed. Speculations arise.

We’ve bumped into something interesting while surfing the web to find London agents. Hotproperty, the one that claims to be the No.1 Independent Property Website, has a new tab on their site:

“Coming soon: AgentPro”

Sounds interesting! Does anybody know more about this?