The ApprenticeRoute

Viewing rentals in a city you’ve never lived in

The first house I rented was in a city I'd been to once, on a family day out years earlier that I mostly remember for the services on the way home. When people say "do your research on the area", that was my research: a train station, one street of shops, and a strong opinion about a motorway Burger King.

I viewed that house on a Saturday in the summer after A-levels, with a couple of people from my cohort's pre-start group chat whom I'd known for barely a fortnight, while the rest watched through a propped-up phone on a video call. We signed about a week later. It worked out. But looking back, it worked out because of four or five sensible decisions and a fair amount of luck, and you can replace the luck with a process.

This article is the process. It assumes you've already found the people you're living with (if not, start with finding housemates before day one), and it stops where the paperwork begins: deposits, referencing and what agents can charge you are covered in renting your first house at 17 or 18. This is the bit in the middle. Choosing which house, from 150 miles away, without embarrassing yourself.

Plan it as one full day

You can't do viewings casually when you live three hours away. "Popping over when something comes up" means four return train fares and your revision, or your notice period at a summer job, falling apart. What works is one full day, booked two to three weeks in advance and planned like a delivery route.

The two-to-three weeks matters. Rental listings have short lives, so anything advertised a month before your visit will be gone by the time you arrive. Pick your date first, tell agents "we're coming up on the 14th", and let them fill the day. Most will happily book ahead for you, because a tenant travelling 150 miles is obviously a serious tenant.

Then:

Letting agents, decoded

A few things about letting agents that nobody tells you at eighteen.

Several brands, one office. Especially in smaller cities, three different agency names on the portals can route to the same desk and the same staff. If a listing vanishes from one brand and reappears under another, that's why. It also means being organised and polite with one agent quietly works for you across several brands at once.

Phone beats email, every time. Email puts you in a queue behind every other applicant. A phone call makes you a real person with a moving date. When a good house goes up, the viewing slots go to whoever rang that morning.

Some listings are bait. Houses let weeks ago stay online because they make the agent's stock look deeper and keep the enquiries coming. So ask directly, first question, every call: "Is this one still available as of today?" You'll be surprised how often the answer is "no, but we've got something similar". Occasionally the something similar is genuinely similar. See it anyway; you're already in town.

Be instantly ready. In a busy market the difference between getting a house and losing it is measured in hours. Keep a folder on your phone with photo ID, your apprenticeship offer letter with the salary on it, guarantor contact details, and the same for every housemate. An eighteen-year-old with a salaried job offer and an organised document pack looks better on paper than plenty of adults, and you can watch agents recalibrate when they realise it. Our offer letters did more for us than anything we said out loud.

The checklist to run in every house

Viewings are short, you're nervous, and the agent talks the whole time. You will forget everything unless it's written down. This is the list I'd put on my phone now, roughly in the order the house presents it to you.

The smell, first. Damp announces itself in the first ten seconds or not at all. Agents air houses out before viewings, so if you can still smell it, trust your nose over the paint job.

Damp and mould, properly. Ceiling corners, window frames and sills, behind any furniture pushed against an outside wall, inside the wardrobes. One freshly painted patch on one wall is a question that deserves a straight answer.

Run the shower. Actually run it. Nobody does this and everybody should. Water pressure is a daily-life feature and you cannot judge it by looking at a shower head. Flush the loo while it's running if you want the advanced course.

Count the bathrooms against the people. One bathroom between four working adults who all leave at eight is a genuine problem, not a quirk you'll adjust to. Watch the layout too: a surprising number of converted shared houses route the only bathroom through the kitchen, which is fine right up until you're queuing past someone's breakfast in a towel.

Security. Key locks on ground-floor windows. A front door with a proper deadlock that doesn't show signs of having been kicked in and repainted. Ask who else holds keys.

Storage. Shared houses are family houses that got carved up, and the storage rarely survived. Several adults' worth of coats, suitcases, hoovers and ironing boards has to live somewhere. Find where.

Bike space. If anyone's cycling to work, where does the bike actually go? "The hallway" is a legitimate answer, but everyone should agree to it now rather than discover it in week two.

Phone signal. Glance at your bars in every room, and notice whether the video call to your remote housemates is holding up. That's a live signal test you're running anyway.

EPC rating. The listing should show it; if it doesn't, every certificate is free to look up on the government's EPC register. This matters more than it sounds. The energy price cap works out at £1,663 a year for a typical dual-fuel household at the moment, but the cap limits unit prices, not your total bill, and a draughty, badly insulated terrace full of working adults is not a typical household. An F or G rating is the landlord telling you in writing that winter will eat a noticeable slice of a pay cheque. Your first three months' budget will feel it.

Who manages it. "Agent-managed" and "landlord-managed" are different products. Ask which this is, then ask the only version of the question that matters: when the boiler dies on a Friday evening in November, who do we ring, and how fast do they usually respond? A vague answer here is itself information.

Council tax band. Look the band up on gov.uk while you're standing outside. Who pays depends on how the tenancy is structured: one joint tenancy and it's the household's bill; individual room contracts in an HMO and it's normally the landlord's, folded into the rent. Ask which this house is. And don't budget like a student, because degree apprentices on a normal salary don't qualify for the full-time student exemption.

Bins and parking. Where do the bins live, and when are they collected? Is the street permit parking, and does the house come with a permit? Boring questions, weekly consequences.

That's a twenty-minute list if you're disciplined. Bring it up on your phone unapologetically. The agent has seen far worse.

Researching streets you can't walk

Between booking the day and travelling up, you can learn a lot from a laptop, provided you know what each source is actually telling you.

Street View the commute, not the house. Drop the little yellow figure at the front door and click your way to the office, the whole route. You're looking for what listing photos crop out: the state of the neighbouring houses, shuttered shops, the takeaway that's open half the night, the railway line at the end of the garden. Check the capture date in the corner. If the imagery is years old, treat it as history rather than news.

Night-time reviews, cautiously. Local forums and subreddits will cheerfully tell you what an area is like after dark. Read them, but remember who posts: people with complaints. Nobody logs on to report that their street was fine again last night. Look for a pattern across many comments, not one vivid story.

Crime maps, with context. Police.uk maps recorded crime street by street. Useful, but read it like a local would. City centres always glow, because that's where the pubs and crowds are, and a cluster of bike thefts at the station tells you about the station, not the terrace behind it. Compare your candidate streets against each other, not against zero.

Why "cheap" and "near work" point at the same streets. The affordable rooms within walking distance of a city-centre office tend to sit in the same few pockets of older terraced housing that got converted into HMOs. That's exactly why they're cheap, and exactly why they suit apprentices. Cheap-and-scruffy is usually fine at eighteen; scruffy means peeling paint and bins out on the wrong day. What you're actually screening for is the street where the forum comments, the crime map and your own Street View walk all frown at once. One source frowning is noise. Three is a signal.

There's a bigger question underneath this, whether to pay more and live close or pay less and commute, and it deserves its own article, which is coming. The short version for year one: your evenings are worth more than you think.

The questions to ask at every viewing

Same list, every house, written down, so the answers are comparable afterwards:

That last one isn't a commitment. It's a speed check on the agent, and the answer tells you how the next fortnight would go.

Trust your read on the agent

Here's the thing I'd underline for my eighteen-year-old self: you're not just choosing a house, you're choosing the people who answer the phone when something in it breaks. The agent at the viewing is giving you a free preview. Late, vague about who manages it, breezy about the damp patch, visibly irritated by your checklist? That's the service you'll get as a tenant, once they hold your deposit and have considerably less reason to charm you.

We saw houses that were better on paper than the one we took. We took the one where the agent turned up on time, knew the answers, and didn't flinch at a list of questions from a group of teenagers. Years later, I stand by it.

A house chosen this way won't be perfect. Ours wasn't. The point of the process isn't perfection; it's reliably dodging the two or three genuinely bad outcomes — the mould house, the silent landlord, the arctic G-rated terrace — that can sour a first year. And it's worth naming what this really is: one of the honest differences between this route and university, weighed properly in degree apprenticeship vs university. No halls, no accommodation office, no one to hand you a room. You're a tenant in the open market at eighteen. It's harder. It was also the first properly adult thing the apprenticeship made me do, and it happened months before day one.