COSMOPOLITAN CONTRACT

COSM OPOLITAN CONT RAC T

The flat-hunting contract

This is an agreement made by A Person Looking For A New Flat, ________________ (hereafter referred to as The Tenant)

1 GRAND DESIGNS

The Tenant will begin her flat-hunt optimistically, by making a list of all her most important criteria. She and her future flatmates will spend an evening drinking wine and writing down things like “natural light!”, “en-suite bathroom” and “roof terrace??”. They will go on Rightmove and filter the results by their criteria. This will leave one flat, which costs three times their budget. In rural Aberdeenshire.

2 KEEPING IT REAL ESTATE

The Tenant will sign up with a few different estate agents, who will all start calling her no fewer than five times a day. This will happen exclusively when she is a) in a work meeting, b) on the toilet or c) at the dentist. The calls will continue for at least six to eight months after she has stopped looking for a flat. Every single time she sees an unknown number flash up on her phone, she will panic and assume her family has been in a terrible accident. It will always be an estate agent.

3 MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

Not a single flat the estate agents suggest will have the right number of bedrooms, or be within the budget. Or in the right area. Sometimes not even in the right city. One will be an actual shed. “Isn’t that… a shed?” The Tenant will ask. The estate agent will tell her confidently that “sheds are the new Scandi”. The Tenant will kick her wall in frustration, then remember that if she does end up renting the shed, she still needs her deposit back.

4 INTERIORS SPAWN

As everyone else is suddenly mysteriously busy, The Tenant will find herself traipsing around viewings alone every night. She will encounter one, if not all, of the following: black mould; orange mould; a white pleather sofa; a toilet that is somehow in the kitchen; that Toulouse-Lautrec poster of a cat. Despite coming to zero viewings, the future flatmates will all have a lot of opinions about things they’d not mentioned until now. Like how one of them can only sleep in a south-facing room, or that another needs a hypoallergenic carpet.

5 BEDROOM POLITICS

As if by magic, The Tenant will find a flat that is somehow in budget, in the right location and mould-free! The only catch will be that it has one huge bedroom, and two bedrooms that appear to be converted cupboards. The Tenant will suggest they all take it in turns to have the massive bedroom, hoping her future flatmates will say she should just have it as a reward for all her hard work finding the place. They won’t.

6 HOME TRUTHS

The Tenant and her future flatmates will end up staging a complex coin-tossing tournament to decide who gets which room, while making passive-aggressive comments about how they really need the extra space for their DJ decks/ craft projects/pet African land snails. Then The Tenant’s phone will ring. It is the estate agent. Does she want to view a lovely studio in an up-and-coming area for only £3,000 a month plus her firstborn child? Yes, she will whisper into the phone. Yes, she does.