Our new home!

We hold it in our hands, the key to our new home! The search for it turned out to be surprisingly easy. First, let's see how a fresh newcomer can embark on the search for a property. We recommend:

* a post in relevant Facebook groups (Cyprus is small, often Germans who live here know about vacant apartments or houses)

* Facebook Marketplace

* direct search on real estate sites (which can also be found through Facebook)

* Bazaraki (the Cypriot eBay Classifieds) However, you can't register here without a Cypriot SIM and you can't contact most providers. But it's worth getting an initial overview and maybe the provider has provided a phone number, then you can easily contact him via WhatsApp.

Last Monday we were able to arrange two spontaneous viewing appointments for the next day, both offers we found on Facebook.

The first house was ideal, inside a bit quaintly furnished with heavy leather sofas and overall a bit dark, but with a lot of space and an extremely large outdoor area, half of it shaded. After the viewing, we were sure that we had found the perfect house for us.

Well, and then came House No. 2 - completely different in style from the first one, a classic house. This house was modern, also very spacious, but more reservedly furnished. The interior totally matched our taste. The outdoor area was smaller than the first house, but all in all our gut feeling said that this was the better choice.

During the viewing of House No. 2, a third real estate agent called and we spontaneously arranged to view a house in Aradippou (where our kindergarten is located) in one hour. To put it straight away: that was nothing. The house was a traditional Cypriot house, whitewashed, but terrible inside. It also didn't smell good. The bedrooms could only be reached via an external staircase, suboptimal with small children... But definitely an experience worth doing!

And now, one week later, we finally came to the contract signing. The contract officially starts on June 1st and runs for one year (of course with the option to be extended). We immediately received the keys and can now plan exactly when we will move and order the most important things from IKEA.

Here are some key data:

* Location: Livadia, in the district of Larnaca, directly on the border with the town of Larnaca

* very good connections to supermarkets, doctors, schools, etc. (in the future, we will only need 7 instead of 17 minutes to get to the kindergarten)

* approximately 800 m as the crow flies from the water

* 3 bedrooms

* 1 bathroom with bathtub, 1 guest toilet

* 140 sqm of living space over 2 floors

* 84 sqm outdoor area

* central heating (only about 10% of the properties in Cyprus have it, but it gets really cold in winter)

* double-glazed windows

* air conditioning

On the property there is a beautiful date palm tree and a shade-giving carob tree.

You can get the address via PM, but there is still plenty of time for birthday and Christmas presents ;-)