Seeking short-term furnished apartments in Zurich

August 21, 2017 7:04 PM

Hello! I'll be moving to Zurich (for work) and living there from mid-Sept to mid-Nov and need to find housing. Can anyone recommend sites where I can book a furnished apartment for about two months? Thank you!
posted by blithecatpie to Work & Money (5 answers total)

Response by poster: I did a google search but I'm overwhelmed with choices and I don't know which sites are reputable.
posted by blithecatpie at 7:46 PM on August 21, 2017

ronorp.net has worked twice for me in the past. Here are their English-speaking housing adverts. If you can read German, their German-language site has still more. The keyword you are looking for there is 'Untermiete' (sublet).

The usual caveats about things that seem too good to be true still apply, but when I last looked, most of the adverts on this site seemed legit.
posted by ogorki at 10:18 PM on August 21, 2017

This is the list of furnished apartments that my company HR gives to people coming for short stays (I can't vouch personally for any of them).:
http://www.pabs.ch/
http://www.visionapartments.com/
http://www.apartments-swiss-star.ch/
http://bhch.ch/
They also suggest ronnorp.net.
posted by jazh at 11:55 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

One thing to correct... I did look at an apt from visionapartments.com. It seemed fine and the one I saw was on Wolframplatz 1. The location was absolutely fine and the apartment was in good condition / furnishings a mix between sterile and trendy.
posted by jazh at 11:59 PM on August 21, 2017

A point of clarification: the sites listed by jazh are letting agencies offering furnished apartments. ronorp is mainly tenants subletting their apartments. I tried both at various times and found sublets to be cheaper and to provide more homelike, less sterile housing. Subletting is explicitly permitted in most Swiss residential rental contracts, and is a common thing to do, even for very short periods (or for extremely long ones - I know people who have lived as subtenants in the same place for years). This is, of course, because the rental market in cities like Zurich is so competitive and high-priced that people will go to great lengths to keep their tenancies alive...
posted by ogorki at 11:08 AM on August 22, 2017