House Hunting from Your Couch

Lo and Behold Coventry Conquerors!

Most of you might have settled by now. This article is for those who haven't found an accommodation yet or are planning to shift to a new property. If you are too lazy to go house hunting in the cold, chilly weather, sit on your laptop and let your fingers do the work. If online house hunting is not your cup of tea, we will talk about the numerous letting agents in Coventry in our upcoming posts. However, I suggest you consider looking at properties online because it's free, convenient and saves a lot of your precious time!

Getting straight to the point, PrimeLocation (click to be directed to their website), according to me, is the best site for house listings.Mainly because they have a long list of properties in Coventry compared to other UK property portals. From experience, I guarantee they never run out of house listings in Coventry, while other websites fall short every now and then, specially during the non-peak months - January and September are the peak months because that's when new graduates or pass outs are replaced by wanna-be-graduates or freshers. Here's how you go about house hunting in Prime Location. Go to their website and click search to rent (or click here to be directly taken there) - as a student, temporarily living in Coventry, this is the right category for you. In the search to rent page, specify your details in the search box - type where you want a property (Coventry of course), your budget, the type of property you're looking for, the number of bedrooms and you're all set to click the search button. If you want a more filtered search, click on more options and specify the exact details of the type of property you're looking for.


After exhausting this portal to its very core, if you don't find anything that really suits your need, I suggest you look at Rightmove. Like Prime Location, Rightmove has a wide range of properties. And of course, how can we forget the student favorite Gumtree - another website that has property ads in EXCESS! If you're a slug (or simply put - really slow) when it comes to getting things done online, you would have to set aside at least a day to go over the property listings they have just for Coventry. No kidding!

Spareroom is another good UK property portal. The merit of this one compared to the other portals I have mentioned so far is that, personally, I think their website is really organised - a key point if you're looking to save time. Everything has its place and you know exactly where to look and for what details - it's pretty easy to jot down property details from this website. You will see what I mean if, suppose, you like something from a featured ad and you decide to click on it to read more. They have a few pictures of the property to give you a vague idea of how the house/room might look like, followed by a short description. All other essential details such as price, contract dates, location on the map, etc. are neatly cataloged on the right hand side.

Overall, these 4 portals are not season restricted, and they have property listings throughout the year. By the time you finish skimming and scanning through these websites, I bet you will find your ideal property. However, in the unfortunate and very unlikely incident that you don't, it doesn't hurt to check Coventry Student Houses.com and Accommodation for Students.com. Yet again, sigh sigh sigh, if your hands are still bare, I guess you are too picky about your accommodation. The penultimate option then would be to request the god of internet, i.e. GOOGLE, to lend you a helping hand. If you don't mind getting off of your couch and disregarding the virtual world, paying a reasonable amount to a letting agent to find you The HOUSE of your dreams would be your last resort. Information on the best letting agents in Coventry will be published on our upcoming posts.

Quick review for those who cannot afford to spare more than 2 minutes of their time to read all the above. Following are some UK property portals that would help you hunt for your ideal accommodation. I have listed them in accordance to my personal view of how helpful and comprehensive they were to me. Click on them to visit the respective websites and commence your house-hunting journey:

1. PrimeLocation
2. Spareroom
3. Gumtree and Rightmove
4. Coventry Student Houses.com and Accommodation for students.com (I found my ideal house before I looked through these 2 websites)

These portals were really helpful for me. I hope they are of great use to you too. Start click-click-clicking and type-type-typing before someone else takes your ideal house. Your perfect house (to be conquered by you) is just a few mouse clicks away.

Hope you rise and shine in your new home sweet home sooner than the soonest soon (:

Signing off

Cheers (the most popular and overused word for saying goodbye in Britain)

--- Kunjika ---

 Photo courtesy: Coventry Telegraph