Accommodation that doesn’t exist or contracts for already occupied housing. Freshmen on the prowl for housing continue to be exposed to swindlers around the start of the semester.
Like previous years, fraudsters keep contacting students with no place to live and selling them rental contracts to residences that don’t exist or that they don’t have the right to.
“We can’t control who contacts students, but we inform everyone that that gets in touch with us how these conmen work and advice them to be careful”, says Peter Fransson, project leader at BoPoolen.
“The conmen have gotten smarter, so you must stay one step ahead and be extra vigilant if you, for example, are asked to deposit money to a foreign bank account”, he continues.
Looking for flats in July
Despite the university admitting fewer students than previous years the demand for housing has not decreased. But BoPoolen doubts we will be seeing students living in tents on Arrival Day. Roughly two weeks ago the amount of private landlords who had applied to BoPoolen was approximately 65. Now that number is 100.
“We see that a lot of students prefer to have their housings for the fall semester in order as soon as they are admitted in the middle of July, while the landlords wake up now in the middle of August”, says Peter Fransson.
Increased website traffic
At the same time, BoPoolen has seen an increase in the number of unique visitors to their website. Last year 16 768 unique visitors found their way to the website between June 1 and August 12. The equivalent number for this year is 22 347. This is an increase of roughly 33 percent.
“The unions, the municipality and the university have gotten better at informing people of our existence”, says Peter Fransson.
“I also believe that we make a more trustworthy impression than Blocket and thereby gain more visitors. It’s not uncommon for people to ask us whether a landlord advertising on Blocket is reliable or not”, he says.
Text: Carl-Johan Kullving
Translation: Jesper Lodin
