The Emergency Housing Office is a service for new students at Umeå university and SLU Umeå who are in urgent need of housing. Our job is to mediate housings between private landlords and students.

Please note that we are not a service for permanent housing, and that the accommodations we mediate are only meant to be temporary.

You must be admitted as a student at Umeå University or SLU Umeå.

Our mission is to primarily help new students, so if you have studied at Umeå University or SLU Umeå before (no matter when or how many points you acquired), or if you are a doctoral student or a guest researcher, we unfortunately cannot prioritize you. You will only get help after we have helped all of the new students.

In order to get help from us, you must also come from a municipality outside the Umeå region and its immediate area. If you live in Umeå or the surrounding municipalities, you are expected to be able to commute, and can therefore not be prioritized.

Unfortunately, we can never guarantee that we will be able to help everyone who register with us, so we therefore advise you to continue looking for an accommodation on your own as well.

If you have not already done so, we recommend that you immediately register at Bostaden Umeå, who has the majority of student rooms and apartments in Umeå. You can also register at Heimstaden and Riksbyggen who also have student accommodations in Umeå.

In addition to that, you can also search around on social medias, for example in Facebook groups. You can also check out Blocket, as some people post their available rooms and apartments.

Once you have registered with us, you will be placed in our housing queue, and once we reach your place in the queue we will start looking for an accommodation for you.

When we mediate an accommodation, we check the information you have filled in, and then we try to find a landlord who fits you.

If we have an accommodation to offer you, we will send it to you in an e-mail. In the e-mail, we will briefly describe the accommodation based on the information the landlord has given to us.

Once you receive an offer, you have 24 hours, counting down from when the e-mail was sent, to accept or reject it.

If you do not reply within the given time frame, we will consider it as if you no longer need our help, and will remove you from our housing queue.

If you accept the offer, we will send you the landlord’s contact information, and you will then get in touch with the landlord yourself.

You must contact the landlord within 24 hours, counting down from when we e-mail you their contact information, and if you fail to do so, the offer expires and you will be removed from the queue.

However, if you instead decide to reject the offer, you will be placed at the back of the queue.

Since we have a limited number of accommodations to mediate, we can offer you a maximum 3 different housing options. If you decide to reject all three offers, you will be removed from the housing queue, since you cannot then be considered to be in urgent need of housing.

With that said, we do still want to emphasize that we can never guarantee that we will have the opportunity to offer you more than one housing option. Our ability to offer you more than one option depends entirely on the size of the queue of the housing applicants and the number of landlords we have on our list. Therefore, we may only be able to offer you one housing option.

Most of the accommodations on our list are lodgings. These are rooms rented out directly by the landlords in their own homes, which means that the size of the room, the rent, the distance from the university, etc. are all different from one accomodation to another.

This is difficult to answer, and depends on different factors.

Sometimes we have accomodations that are available but does not suit those that are at the front of the queue.

Since we mediate accommodations offered by private landlords, it is them who decide what kind of tenant they want. This means that if the landlord only wants male tenants, we cannot send a female tenant, or, if the landlord has pets, we cannot send a student with an allergy to pets.

However, apart from such possible exceptions, we work from the top and down the queue as usual.

One thing that can prolong the process is how long a student takes to reply to a housing offer.

All students have 24 hours to respond to an offer, but unfortunately, some choose to neither accept or reject it. This means that the housing offer will be waiting for 24 hours without anything happening, which in turn means that it will take longer before we can offer it to the next student in the queue.

Therefore, if you are in our queue but realize that you no longer need our help, we kindly ask you to contact us to let us know, so that we instead can help the next student in the queue. Keep in mind that you are only one of many students in our queue, so we ask you to take into consideration those who actually need our help.

We understand that you may feel tempted to contact us every now and then to check how far ahead you are in the queue, but we kindly ask you to try to avoid doing this, as it does not speed up the process. We are working as fast as we can and will contact you as soon as it is your turn.

As soon as we have received all your information, we can begin to mediate your accommodation to the students.

When we mediate an accommodation, we check the information that you filled in, and then look for a student that matches your preferences and the information you submitted. Once a student has accepted the offer for your accommodation, we give them your contact details, and the student then contacts you directly.

Once we have given your contact details to a student, we will text you to let your know, and if no student then contacts you within 24 hours, feel free to either text, e-mail or call us to let us know, so that we instead can offer your accommodation to the next student in queue.

This can depend on different things.

The number of eligible students that we can send to you depends on the preferences and information you have given us, but we also try to take the students’ needs and wants into account.

For example, if you only want to have female students as tenants, the number of eligible students we can send to you decreases, or if you have a pet, we cannot send a student who is allergic to pets there.

That is completely up to you, but regardless of what you wish to charge in rent, remember that it should be reasonable and fair.

The rent is usually based on what is included in the accommodation: if the room is furnished, if internet is included, if the student has access to their own bathroom, etc.