I thought it would be useful to share my experience in arranging my apartment and office swap with the SYS community. This will be the first of a series of posts while I enjoy my time here in Valencia, Spain as SYS’s First Swapper! The three areas I will touch on are getting approval from your company, negotiating with your landlord (if applicable), and preparing your apartment for the arrival of your fellow swapper.
Getting Approval from your Company
For me, this was actually the easiest part of the process but I suspect that, for you, it might be the most difficult. I was fortunate in that A.J. Lawrence, CEO of The JAR Group (my employer), was the first person who told me about SYS. A.J. is good at identifying trends and he heard of SYS early on and thought it might be an opportunity that I would find interesting. Well, he was right and here I am! In order to seek formal approval, however, I prepared a document that outlined the experience, the benefits, my professional and personal goals, and the logistics of communication and my estimated hours of availability. Below is the document:
Slideshare embeds aren’t working properly, but you can view the document here!
Notably, the document I prepared is fairly basic. Depending on the size of your company, your position, and other factors you may need to add more details. This should at least give you a general idea of what might work!
Negotiating With Your Landlord (queue Brooklyn landlord mafia music…)
In general, I would recommend not telling your landlord that you are allowing someone else stay in your apartment. However, this might not be possible depending on the length of your stay and how you pay your rent. For example, if you’re only gone a month you may be able to get by without telling your landlord. However, if you’re gone two months this becomes an issue when you need to pay your second months rent. Remember that this is technically not a sublet. You are still responsible for your rent or mortgage payment and your swapper for theirs. Check your lease agreement and see if there is a clause that says whether or not you can allow someone else to live in your space. Even if there is a clause, it’s probably easier to avoid the question of allowing an unknown party stay in your apartment unless you feel it’s absolutely necessary to broach the subject.
In my case, my landlord lives upstairs so the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” scenario would have been difficult to pull off. About a month prior to the swap I approached my landlord about the idea. She said at first blush she was fine with it – then she went out of town for two weeks. Based on her word, I went ahead and booked my ticket. Bad, bad move on my part! When she got back from her trip she told me she was having second thoughts. She was having issues with the tenant upstairs and wanted to avoid any possible trouble with an unknown tenant. I had to explain to her that I had already booked my ticket and express that I had been doing due diligence of my own. I wanted her to understand that I was putting a lot on the line by doing the swap as well. I was allowing someone I had never met to not only enter my personal space, but use my desk, and potentially be introduced to my friends and professional contacts. I wanted her to understand this and know that I too had done my research. At this point she came around and requested two professional references from my swapper. He sent these the next day.
The final part of the negotiation had to do with rent payment. We agreed that I would prepay two months of rent and an additional security deposit. Her request for an additional security deposit did not make me too happy! I already had a security deposit per my lease agreement that would cover any damages so it didn’t make sense to have an additional deposit. On top of this, she deposited all three checks at once (rent payment x3). If you can, I would recommend trying to stay away from prepaying rent and mail the checks or have a friend deliver them. A single payment for 3x rent hitting your bank account can definitely hurt your cash flow!
This part of the swap proved to be most challenging. Hopefully you own your apartment or house and don’t have to deal this. Also, if you don’t live in Brooklyn or NYC for that matter, I’m sure you’ll have an easier time. Luckily, it all worked out in the end for me!
Preparing your Apartment for the Arrival of your Swapper
Perhaps the easiest part of the process was preparing for the arrival of the swapper. The three things I did were clean my apartment, stash away important goods and documents, and create a guide to my apartment and my neighborhood. True, nobody likes cleaning (at least I hope not) so that doesn’t fall into the enjoyable category. Neither does stashing away important goods or documents. I recommend putting these items in a box and taking them to a friend who lives nearby. I didn’t want tax documents or items like my birth certificate and social security card laying around my apartment. However, what was slightly enjoyable was creating a guide to not only my apartment and also to Brooklyn. The guide is below:
Slideshare embeds aren’t working properly, but you can view the document here!
You may not need a guide this in depth! In my case, I met my Swapper in Valencia, Spain first so he was going to be in Brooklyn without me there to show him things or introduce him to contacts. So, I felt it was necessary to put together a somewhat detailed guide. Hopefully it helped!
Notice the last section in the above document – “essential contacts” (friends, office, car service, etc). In my next blog post I hope to cover how to build a base of contacts in a foreign city, beyond just the contacts that are given to you by your swapper, so that you can truly enjoy your experience!
Have Some Fun on your Swap, My Trip to Ibiza & Formentera
