Why It’s So Difficult for Digital Nomads To Find an Apartment in Spain

Less than a week after arriving in Alicante, our new home, we’re officially settled into our new apartment! 🎉 While it took a lot of hard work — scheduling appointments, running around town for visits, and speaking Spanish with all the realtors/landlords — I’m glad that it paid off. However, it was a little more difficult than I anticipated in some ways. It turns out that it can be really tricky for digital nomads to find an apartment in Spain.

If you’re a digital nomad in Spain searching for an apartment, keep reading. Not only have I experienced the housing search here in Alicante, but I also went through the process in Madrid a few years ago.

So, now that I’ve gone through it twice, with two totally different experiences, in two different situations, and in two different cities, I feel like I have enough knowledge to share that could be helpful.

Competition for Housing

The other day, I saw an Instagram reel posted by someone who had just moved to London. The caption said: “Flat hunting in London looks like applying to a listing that’s been up for 7 minutes + finding out it already has 225 applicants 🥲”

While the situation in Spain doesn’t seem to be quite that bad, finding somewhere to live can still be pretty tricky.

When I moved to Madrid in 2018, competition was especially fierce. Not only was I trying to find somewhere to live in Spain’s most populous city, it was also September… close to the beginning of the school year. Considering that Madrid is home to 19 universities, that means there were a lotttt of students moving into the area and looking for the same type of housing I was — just a bedroom in a shared apartment.

The day I arrived in Madrid, I had an appointment to see my future apartment for the first time. After my future roommate gave me the tour, I said: “It looks great! How soon would I be able to move in?” And he told me that they had already shown the apartment to some other people, and were showing it to a few more. “We’ll tell you our decision sometime this weekend.”

So, it really ended up being like an interview. I was lucky that they chose me because I didn’t have any other appointments set up, and I met many other people from the NALCAP program who ended up spending weeks looking for housing.

I noticed during our apartment search in Alicante that there didn’t seem to be nearly as much competition. Maybe because it’s January, maybe because Alicante only has one university. I don’t know. But it seemed like apartment listings were more likely to stay on Idealista for more than a day or two, so there wasn’t as much pressure to find a place. (Which is one reason we decided to live in Alicante without ever visiting it!)

But there was one thing that made our search much more difficult than I anticipated.

Seguro de Impago in Spain: Non-Payment Insurance

In Alicante, there wasn’t a lack of available housing. Instead, there was a lack of people who wanted to rent to us, as Americans. 😬

Okay, so actually, it wasn’t the fact that we were Americans. It was the fact that we don’t work for a Spanish company and receive Spanish payments. Which meant that we aren’t eligible for the “seguro de impago,” or non-payment insurance, which seems to be really common.

From what I understand, seguro de impago protects the landlord if their tenant doesn’t pay their rent. It also covers eviction, property damage, and more. That’s all well and good, but why does it matter where the tenant’s paychecks are coming from?

As one real estate agent explained to me via WhatsApp, apparently the guarantees of the policy are made against the tenant’s payroll? She said that I needed to have some type of “seizable” account in Spain (and I guess my Spanish bank account wasn’t enough) in order to be eligible for the seguro de impago. Which makes me think they must somehow deduct your rent from your paychecks if you don’t pay.

We are always going to pay our rent on time, so it was frustrating that even offering to show our bank statements and proof of the rigorous financial requirements we met for the Spain digital nomad visa wasn’t enough.

A Matter of Trust

For the most part, when we were dealing with the seguro de impago issue, we were talking to real estate agents acting on behalf of the landlords. To them, we probably just seemed like random Americans who couldn’t necessarily be trusted to be good tenants.

In one situation, I was talking to a property owner for several days and even had an appointment scheduled to check out his apartment. The day before, he started messaging me and asking some questions about what Matt and I do for work. I thought he was just curious, so I told him we worked in marketing. He asked for more details, so I thought maybe he was interested because he was in the same industry or because he wanted to hire us. And then he asked for my LinkedIn account, and I thought, okay, maybe he just wants to vet me a little bit through my professional profile instead of just chatting through WhatsApp.

But then, he sent me this message (which I just ran through Google Translate):

“Cathy, the company you work for is a small business. I am mortgaged and I am looking for a less bold and more conservative profile. Any non-payment of yours could cause me non-payments to the bank, given my circumstances. I need the peace of mind of having a tenant with a certain and stable income, which at least in Spain is achieved with a payroll, a certain seniority and more orthodox professions.”

I understood, but it was still a punch in the gut — especially after having seen three apartments that day, all of which looked much better in the photos than they did in real life. Instead of crying, I reminded myself that it wasn’t in a neighborhood we liked, anyway, and got back to work setting up more appointments for the next day.

Finding the Right Fit

That next morning, we met Pepa, the first landlord who actually did her own showing of the apartment rather than a real estate agent. As we talked to her, we learned that she was looking for someone exactly like us to move in. She wanted a quiet couple with no kids or pets, and I made sure to tell her that we were remote workers — just to be sure she didn’t have any problems with that.

Rather than being put off, she told us that one of her daughters is living and working in NYC and talked about her daughter’s remote work situation. Which told me two things: one, she understood being remote workers is a real job, and it didn’t bother her; and two, she can empathize with us living and working in a foreign country, just like her daughter is doing.

Pepa explained that she’d shown the apartment to several other people and had other appointments later that day as well. She wanted to show enough people to have a good selection of potential tenants to choose from, which totally made sense. As we were leaving, I told her that Matt and I would let her know whether we were interested as soon as possible — we had another appointment right afterwards — and she said she was excited to hear back from us. I also told her that, if we decided to move forward, we were happy to provide any types of financial documentation she wanted.

We didn’t like the next apartment as much, so we texted Pepa as soon as we left: “Nos encantaría alquilar tu vivienda. 😍” We would love to rent your apartment.

And Pepa replied almost immediately: “Estoy muy contenta con vuestra decisión. Me gustáis como inquilinos.😊” I’m very happy with that decision. I like you guys as tenants.

So, it didn’t take long after meeting Pepa for us to all mutually choose each other and know that we’d found the right fit. After sending over our legal documentation and bank statements from the last three months, we met up with Pepa and her husband two days later to sign the contract and get the keys to our new home.

The Eleven-Month Spanish Rental Contract

One more thing that could be useful to anyone reading this post is something I just learned about when reviewing our rental contract. I noticed that the rental period was listed from January 18 to December 18, 2024 — only 11 months instead of a typical 12-month contract. Assuming there was a good reason for this, as Pepa hadn’t mentioned anything about us needing to leave by the end of the year, I turned to Google.

It turns out that 11-month rental contracts are extremely common in Spain for legal reasons that are actually somewhat dubious. Basically, an 11-month contract is considered “temporary,” and theoretically, it is not subject to some of the limitations imposed on long-term rentals, or anything 12 months or longer.  For example, according to Spanish law in the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos (LAU, or Spanish Urban Tenancy Act), long-term rentals grant tenants the right to stay in the apartment for a minimum of three years, or five to seven years in other cases.

However, the more research I’ve done, the more it seems like it’s not actually true that the 11-month contract would be a loophole. Several sources I’ve read state that, in a court of law, even 11-month rental contracts would be subject to the LAU’s guidelines, which are actually very extensive protections for tenants. Here’s what one lawyer had to say on Idealista’s blog:

“Eleven-month contracts are a popular urban myth that somehow manages to perpetuate itself from one year to the next. Such contracts were designed to circumvent the lenient tenant entitlements laid out by Spain’s Urban Tenancy Act (which deals with 12 months renewable contracts). 11-month contracts are void and when challenged at court, a judge will rule they are in fact a long-term contract subject to the LAU, meaning tenants can stay in a property for five or seven years.”

Basically, tenants have a lot of rights here in Spain, which is really good to know. And while we signed an 11-month contract, I’m not really worried about it at this point — when we signed the contract, Pepa explained that despite the timeframe, they weren’t going to kick us out in December and we are welcome to continue living in our apartment. And who even knows what our situation will be in a year.

 

Despite all the crazy Spanish bureaucracy (and there is a LOT of it) I’m just glad to be here and writing this from the comfort of my new home. 🙂

For those moving to Spain, let me know what questions you have! I hope this is helpful, and I know it can get frustrating, but keep at it. Something will work out. Ánimo!

-Cathy

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