How to get an apartment in Den Haag?

Hi and welcome to the Forum.

First of; at the top of this page is a link to our own Housing section; please check that out first.

If that hasn't worked and you're back reading this, you're discovering one of the problems in living in Holland as an Expat and the problem isn't simple.  There is a shortage of decent accommodation in key areas in the west (Den Haag and Amsterdam); the vast majority of rental apartments that you see online are indeed almost certainly already gone by the time you've seen them; some websites are just scams picking up passing traffic for advertising revenue and are leeching data from other sites.  For people asking where to look, I tend to point people towards Pararius, not because they are any better, but they seem to exist and I've never had any negative feedback from others I've pointed in that direction; this link will take you to their website.

The bottom line is you don't have time to shop around, get the best deal, find the nicest place, because, by the time you've done all that, the apartment has gone.

My advice is to find an agency (ask your colleagues who they used when they did it), register with them, tell them what you want and wait.

Alternatively, choose somewhere else in Holland to live, the further away you are from the west, the easier it gets.

Hope this helps.

Cynic
Expat Team

Hi Cynic,

Thank you for your helpful and quick response to my problem.  I'm going to contact an agency to help me with my search.  I'm already quite settled on Den Haag, I only have a couple more months before my tourist status runs out, and although it would likely be easier in other parts of the Netherlands, for me that would mean adjusting to a whole new area of a country I hardly know.  Plus, I plan on setting up my business here under the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, so it would be more difficult for me to set it up somewhere else in the Netherlands and then later move it here.

I have been using reviews on Google Maps to try to narrow down rental agencies.  I have found so many bad reviews, but I figure that people are more likely to submit reviews when they have had problems.  I have tried to minimize reviews with little or no text, or from reviewers who only submitted one review.  I also sorted reviews by date to see if there have been trends about agencies and whether customers have had better experiences more recently with them.

I knew apartment hunting would be difficult here, but I never imagined it would be this hard.  I had also thought that since the weather here is colder now, that would make things better.  But so far that hasn't seemed to help much either.

I was getting quite discouraged before I found this website.  Thank you for your suggestions.  They give me more hope that I can stay here.  I'm glad I found this website and forum.

David