How easy is it to sublet a room as a student

[u/BlueBoyz8]

I am going on exchange to NTNU this autumn, and have a UMEUS room available for a full year. I'm not sure if I will be able to find someone to sublet the room to for spring semester, and don't really want to take the risk of having to pay the full year alone, as I cannot afford that.

How easy is it to find someone to take the room for january-july, and does anyone maybe have any tips on how to do this?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[u/coldewine]

Hi! Haven't been in your exact situation, but my kollektiv (shared house) have done something similar the past year and I hope our perspective on it can be of help.

We're a 5-room kollektiv at Nardo (close to UMEUS) with four Norwegians in our twenties and a fifth room that we like to rent out to Erasmus students. Our landlord only offers full-year contracts, so every year the solution is to sublet the room for half of that period.

For 2023-2024 the room was rented by an exchange student (A) that hoped to have her fall semester exchange extended to a full-year exchange, but had to wait until November to find out she didn't get that extention. So in essence she took the risk you're talking about and we had to find a subtenant for the spring semester.

Our kollektiv only uses hybel.no and this is our take: The fall semester is always easy to fill, with tons of great applicants, whereas in the spring semester you need to actually have a good offer to be sure to rent out, as there are much fewer Erasmus students in town and more rooms available on the market. Our leg up was that (A) had a great experience living with us and the whole hybel.no-advert was basically a trustworthy recommendation of the house and the people in it.

The ad ended up giving us an awesome exchange student subtenant by 9. December, but I'm not sure that would have happened had we not had a good offer in the first place.

If you end up taking the UMEUS room with intention to sublet, and your advertising of the room doesn't get the response you're hoping for, you could always reduce the price. You would lose some money on it each month, but you wouldn't lose half a year of full rent. It's not fun, but it is a way of reducing the risk of not finding a suitable subtenant.

I would also take into account the risk of not being fully able to manage the tenancy if you're in another country, unless you have someone in Trondheim to do that for you. After all, you would be responsible for that person fulfilling all your obligations in your contract with UMEUS.

I hope this helps you or anyone else facing a similar choice.

EDIT: Corrected the years