 Hi guys, a very warm welcome back to my YouTube channel. Daniel Rosel here bringing you this video today from a very, very wet and windy Jerusalem. I got some flak on one of my last YouTube videos because I said that the winter has settled in here to Jerusalem. But I hadn't actually been outside today, outside that day to verify that fact I was basing on the previous day's weather. So today I have been thoroughly soaked in the weather and I can confirm that we really have the winter getting on here in Israel. It's such a weird climate because I always feel like there is spring and autumn, what the Americans call fall, never doesn't really seem to exist here. Just kind of there's, you can almost pinpoint a three day period where the seasons just change and we've just gone into real winter mode here. So today as it's a quintessential rainy winter's day, I thought I would do a little video about renting in Israel. Now, before I do videos, I always look on YouTube to see if someone's done a better job, in which case I don't need to do my own video. I saw there was a little four minute video about renting in Israel and while that was very useful, I wanted to go a little bit deeper drawing on my personal experience in the Israeli rental market. So I have been renting property in Israel since 2015, which means that this is my ninth year renting and I really hope it's going to be my last year renting property. I've been renting places basically since I moved here and the reason that I'm a long term renter and a lot of people are long term renters in Israel is just that the cost of property is bananas. It is really, really expensive. If you want to find out how expensive, go on to a website called yadstime.co.l. We'll be referring to Yadstime later in this in this podcast slash video cast. It's like the main Israeli property listing website because I know a lot of my folks watching my videos are in Ireland. It's roughly comparable to daft.ie where you've got rental properties listed. So, you know, there was an article I was quoted in about a year ago and it's talking about the rise and rise of the property market. And the figure quoted was that you needed more than 200,000 euro in equity to get to simply make a down payment. And the down payments in Israel are set by the Bank of Israel at a minimum of 20% and they're usually higher. So it's just extraordinarily difficult for young people making normal salaries. And I would put myself in that category. I work in marketing communications. I don't I'm slightly above the average national salary, but not by a whole lot. It's a pretty average paycheck. No disrespect to my employer and while I can sort of, you know, get by month to month and spend a bit of money on my beloved tech year. I was trying to reach for some of that, but it's all over my desk. It's still to accumulate that kind of capital still seems kind of impossible to me. Hence, I've remained renting basically renting in Israel. Let's just kind of break down intersections. Firstly, how do you find rental property? So there's a number of rental listing websites in the country. One of the one as the one I mentioned is called Yad Shtaim. And that's kind of this really it looks like you'd go on to it and you think how is this the main buy and sell website in Israel? Literally looks like it's stuck in the 1990s, although it did get a bit of a facelift recently, but it's still a bit clunky. But that is the main one. Now, Yad Shtaim isn't the only place there's also a huge array of Facebook groups that are out there. So if you're looking now, if you don't speak Hebrew, I'm going to make this point a few times. You're going to be at a real disadvantage because there are Facebook groups only in Hebrew. But there is, of course, Google Translate. So if all you type of all you are able to do is type into Google Translate Jerusalem apartments to rent, you'll probably or Tel Aviv apartments to rent or wherever you're looking at, you'll probably be able to find more options. You're always going to be limited by just searching in English. And Yad Shtaim, that website that I mentioned is not in English. You can, of course, use the Google Translate Chrome extension or what or Firefox extension, whatever browser you're using. And you'll be able to access it. But by default, it's available in Hebrew. So that's where most people find rentals. Some people find them through word of mouth, through friends. But if you're coming new to the country without any network or such, you're probably your best bet will be keeping an eye on those two those two websites. Now, how are rentals in Israel price? So the typical price is going to be in quoted in thousands of shackles per month, right? So let's say 8000 shackles per month would be very typical. And in Tel Aviv, you could be getting all the way up to 15,000 or for luxury stuff. 20, you know, there's really no ceiling here on those websites like Yad Shtaim. You can put in your budget, which of course is useful. Now, there's a few costs that are important to know about beyond the actual cost of the rentals. So the cost of the rental is number one. The second thing you need to ask about is something called Arnona. Arnona is a municipal tax that's levied on business and rental and privately owned properties in Israel. It funds the local municipalities. So the rate of Arnona is going to vary depending on where in the country you are and even where in the city you are. So in Jerusalem where I've been living, there are different rates of Arnona per different neighborhood and it's based on a per square meter. So the municipality may periodically visit your property to formally measure how many square meters are in your apartment. And that's another point really in Israel for those who aren't familiar with the country. We're usually talking about at least in the big cities, renting properties. Of course, there are standalone detached houses in Israel and there are some of those on the rental market. But if you're looking in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv or maybe even Haifa, you're probably going to be looking as apartments. And Israelis are sort of very, very used. There's a very strong culture here of apartment living as opposed to other places in the world where it's more common to kind of own a detached property or aspire to do that. Okay, so Arnona basically sometimes is included in the rent. Now, technically the responsibility falls on the tenant. But sometimes the landlord for the sake of simplicity will tack it on to the rent. So you can ask how much is so if, if, but in the normal situation in which the Arnona isn't quoted, you need to ask what's the Arnona and they'll give you a figure per month. And it's not insignificant. It might be, you know, on that 8,000 hypothetical 8,000 shekel apartment. We talked about that might be 500 shekels. So you need to ask that. And the second thing would be the VAD by that's a kind of common thing. VAD by means committee for the house. So because most Israelis live in apartments, there is a committee which takes care of the common spaces in the apartment. That's the VAD in modern Hebrew, the alif and the iron are, are not distinguished between, but it's VAD technically, alif, iron, I believe. And they are the party responsible for, you know, for what's going on. So the VAD bite can vary from a kind of very tokenistic charge of maybe 50 shekels per apartment per month. And what that money is typically used for is, you know, keeping the public spaces clean, paying the paying for the public, paying for the electricity in the public spaces like the lighting. But the VAD bite can be more expensive if you're living in a high rise with an elevator, because those are very expensive to to maintain. So that's you need to ask the Arnona. You need to ask the VAD bite and utilities as in other places in the world in Israel. We pay for our water as well as our electricity, needless to say. So you can ask what those bills work out to on average. Now, the average tenancy duration in Israel, of course, all kind of permutations are possible. It's 12 months. The most people are renting a property here for for one year. And typically you'll give your landlord checks. Now, again, there's no kind of legal stipulation as to how this works. Landlords like checks because you can you can give them 12 checks and they can only catch them in on the on the on the date. Now, you can technically cancel checks, but it's illegal illegal gray area at best. And it's definitely worth consulting with the lawyer if you run into difficulties. Speaking of lawyers and rental contracts. So there was this sort of attempt to make Israel more rental friendly. The reason Israel is not rental friendly is really because I think property has gone up to such an extent and it used to be quite easy to buy property here. And that has just changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. So we're now seeing the new generation of Israelis who cannot afford to get on the property market. And thus the the incentive and the expediency for Israel to actually legislate a proper tenant protection code has been growing. And I expect and hope to see more of more regulations, better regulations in incoming years. It's currently a little bit of a gray area or not gray area, but the regulation isn't necessarily imposed that well. There was, for example, an attempt to make it illegal for realtors to charge tenants for viewing property. Now, what's currently happened or what has happened is that the realtors came around with a kind of a hack. By which they force tenants to sign a contract hiring them to view that property and they're charging the other side of the transaction to they're charging the landlords. So it's really a bit of a scam, in my opinion. But unfortunately, when everyone in the market does this, you basically you can technically find an apartment without a realtor, but it's very difficult. So the vast majority of people are kind of de facto forced to hire realtors. And their fee is typically one month rent plus VAT of 17%. So when you're looking at the cost of a property, you're looking at the monthly cost of the rental, you're adding on to that the Arnona, you're adding on to that the VAT by then the utilities. And then finally, you might also be adding on to that the rent, the realtor fee plus VAT and divide that by 12. So you can build a little spreadsheet if you want to see what your actual monthly costs are. And they might come out as quite a bit higher than just the upfront cost of the rental in terms of legal stuff. So you can pay lawyers to review a rental contract. We did that for our current rental and it's about like 400 shekels or 350 yet another expense, unfortunately, but they can they can spot some clauses that are potentially illegal. And the rental contracts here if if you bother to read them, which you should are usually pretty grim reading. It's a set of obligations on the tenant, typically forbidding subletting, forbidding, you know, putting all kinds of responsibilities on the tenant and not really very little to none on the landlord. And that's why I say that the we need stronger tenant protection codes here in Israel because the current situation whereby so many people have to rent, but renting involves. You know, agreeing to these draconian terms doesn't really suit, you know, so many people's interests. And that's basically it, I would say in terms of utilities. When you join in your apartment, you typically have to take over the Arnona, take over the Christie meter, take over the internet, take, take over the utilities. And when you leave the system for getting off the Arnona varies by by municipality, and I would say it's a very imperfect system. In Jerusalem, you have to pay the Arnona really they want you to pay it by year, which as a tenant is very problematic because you might have a January to January lease. Or sorry, I should say a June to June lease. And in January, the Arnona works according to the fiscal year from January to December, January comes round and you have to pay for the full year. Jerusalem makes it on crazy difficult to pay anything other than yearly installment. So what I have to do is pay half the amount. And I then get if I'm staying in the tenancy, I then get charged invoice. Sorry, interest because they regard me as having not paid the full amount, even though. So the only way around that is I pay the full amount and the landlord has to have to trust the landlord will reimburse me up to half a year's Arnona, which could be thousands of dollars if I leave according to my tenancy end date. So there's lots of problems, in my opinion, in how renting is set up in Israel. And particularly, I would say the Jerusalem municipality do a poor job at making life easy, easy for tenants, even getting off the Arnona is a whole, you know, paperwork. You have to prove that you've left and there's a new tenant coming in. And it does feel sometimes like they're just trying to make life as difficult as possible for tenants, unfortunately. So that's my experience renting in Israel. As I say, I hope that this will be my ninth and final year doing it because, you know, I'm currently my boiler has broken down. So I've no hot water. It's freezing cold. My landlord is not responding. And this really has just been kind of the sort of continuous theme of my time renting in Israel. It's been dealing with the best poor landlords. And at worst, I had to leave an apartment because they ripped out the toilet. I have a video somewhere on my YouTube channel, or maybe I'll tack it on at the end of this video. But literally, there was a plumbing issue and the landlord took out my toilet, thereby leaving me toiletless. And I had to actually leave that apartment and cancel checks. There was no he wasn't willing to break the lease, despite the fact that I did not have an operational toilet in which to, you know, use my bodily exercise, my bodily needs. So that's renting in Israel kind of sucks. Needs to be better, but I hope if you're looking to go into it, that's made you a bit better informed. Of course, these are all generalizations. There are better landlords out there, but you should know at least these things if you're going into renting property in Israel. That's it for today's video. I hope this has been informative. And if you want to get more videos from me about living in Israel, please consider subscribing to this YouTube channel.