Q&A

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

Note that we don’t offer service for permanent accommodation. We convey only temporary accommodation.

What are the requirements to be eligible for help?

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

Our mission is to primarily help new students. 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 the new
students.

In order to get help from us, you must come from a municipality outside the Umeå region and its immediate area.

If you live in Umeå or surrounding municipalities, you are expected to be able to commute, and therefore cannot be prioritized.

If you are moving to Umeå from a foreign country, you must come from a European Union member state, and you shouldn’t be a fee-paying student or be admitted to an exchange program. If this is the case, you should instead contact International Housing Office at Umeå university.

Am I guaranteed housing?

Unfortunately, we can never guarantee that we will be able to help everyone who registers with us, so we also advise you to continue looking for accommodation on your own.

If you have not already done it, we suggest that you register at Bostaden Umeå, that holds the majority of student rooms and apartments in Umeå. In addition to that, you can do some search on social media, for example in Facebook groups. You can even check out Blocket, where a number of private individuals put up their free rooms and apartments.

What happens after I register?

Once you have registered with us, you will be placed in our housing queue.

Members of Umeå Student Union will be prioritized.
You can become a member even if the course or program you are studying falls under the jurisdiction of another student union, and if you are a member of another student union, you pay a reduced membership fee for a membership in Umeå Student Union.

You don’t need to be a member of Umeå Student Union to get help, but the membership increases the chances that you will get it.

If you are a member of Umeå Student Union, you must submit either a screenshot of the receipt or a screenshot from your bank where we can see that you have paid to villhyra@akutrum.nu to confirm it.

How does the conveyance work?

When we convey housing, we check the information you have filled in: whether you are an allergy sufferer, whether you have a car etc., and then we try to find a landlord who accommodates your needs.

If we have accommodation to offer you, we send you an email. In the email, we describe the accommodation in short words, based on the information the landlord gave to us.

When you receive the offer, you have 24 hours to accept or reject the offer, from the moment the email is sent.

If you don’t reply within a given time, we consider that you no longer need our help and remove you from our housing queue.

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

You must contact the landlord within 48 hours, from the moment we email you with their contact information. If you fail to do so, the offer expires and you are removed from the queue.

However, if you decide to reject the offer, you are placed at the end of the queue, even if you are a member of Umeå Student Union and are a prioritized student.

Since we have a limited number of homes to convey, we can offer you maximum 3 different housing options. If you decide to reject all three offers, we remove you from the housing queue, because then you are not considered to be in urgent need of housing.

With that said, we want to emphasize that we can never guarantee 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.

What kind of housing do you offer?

The majority of homes we provide are, with a few exceptions, owned by private landlords. These are rooms rented out directly by the landlords in their own homes, which means that the size of the room, rent, distance from the university, etc. are all different from one home to another.

When do I get a housing offer?

This is difficult to answer, and depends on different factors.
Sometimes we have accomodation that’s available but doesn’t fit those that are at the top of the queue.

Since we convey the accommodation offered by private landlords, it is them who decide what kind of tenant they want to have. This means that if the landlord only wants male tenants, we can’t connect them with female tenants, or, if the landlord has pets, we can’t connect them with a pet allergy sufferer.

However, apart from such possible exceptions, we work from the top down in the queue as usual. One thing that can take time is how long it takes a student to respond to a housing offer.

As said, all students have 24 hours to respond, but unfortunately, some choose not to. This means that the housing offer will be there for 24 hours without anything happening, which in turn means that it will take longer before we can help the next student in the queue.

If you are in our queue but realize that you no longer need our help, we kindly ask you to contact us and announce it, so we can instead help the next student in the queue. Keep in mind that you are one of many students in our queue, so we ask you to take into account those who actually need our help.

We understand if 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 your process at all. We work 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 the conveyance of your accommodation to students.

How does the conveyance work?

When we convey housing, we check the data you filled in and look for a student that matches your preferences and the information you submitted.

Then, when a student accepts your offer, we give them your contact details and the student contacts you directly.

Sometimes a student may accept an offer, but then decide not to go forward with it for some reason. If the student doesn’t let us know that they no longer need housing, it still remains marked as occupied in our register, so the landlord ends up in a kind of limbo where no new students are offered that accommodation.

In order to prevent that, we send you an email (if you have an email address) and/or an SMS (if you have a mobile phone number) to inform you that we have a student for you. If the student doesn’t contact you within 48 hours, you can send us an email, SMS or call us to inform us so we can offer your housing to the next student in queue instead.

Why am I not getting any students?

This can depend on many things.

The number of matching students we can find for you depends on the preferences and information you give to us, but we also try to take into account students’ needs and wants.

For example, if you only want to have female students as tenants, the number of matching students we can find for you decreases, or if you have a pet, we cannot get you a student who’s allergic to animal hair.

How much can I charge for rent?

This is completely up to you. 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. On the Emergency housing’s list of landlords, the average rent is between 2500 kr – 3000 kr/month.