How to find a place to live: Bogota apartments

Whether you are looking for long-term or short-term accommodation in Bogota, there are a number of websites advertising Bogota apartments for rent. You might also find my other post about the neighbourhoods and where to live in Bogotá useful.

Long-term accommodation

Renting long-term normally means committing to at least a one year contract. I’ve yet to come across an owner who will agree to include a 6-month break-clause in the contract. The most popular websites advertising Bogota apartments and other types of accommodation are Finca Raíz and Metro Cuadrado. Here you can enter your specifications and budget, as well as choose the areas of the city you’d like to live in. These sites will also give you a list of relevant results and contact numbers for the landlords or Estate Agents. Zona Prop and La Mudi are other options, but I find these websites less user-friendly. Some Air B’n’B* hosts offer generous discounts for guests wishing to stay for at least a month, so this could be an option too.

Short-term accommodation

CX Hostel

The CX Hostel in Chapinero offers a free bed (in an 8-bed dorm) and breakfast to their volunteers. If you can commit to volunteering at the hostel for at least one month, this might be a good option for you when you first arrive in Bogota. Unsurprisingly, they receive a lot of interest from people wanting to volunteer, so contact them to ask about their vacancies.

Airbnb

Airbnb is a popular website for finding short-term furnished apartment rentals all over the world. If you are only planning to stay in Bogota for 1-2 weeks or less, this might be the best option for you, with rooms from  USD$10/night to entire luxury apartments at $500/night. If you will be in Bogota for 3-6 months, you could contact the users on Airbnb to ask if they would be willing to agree to a cheaper monthly price (and some users already offer discounts on longer term stays).

Apts Colombia

Apts Colombia is another website where you can search for short-term accommodation. However, the apartment descriptions are much briefer and there are fewer cheap options. That said, the apartments on offer do appear to be decorated to a high standard and offer all of the amenities you could want. They are also all located in decent areas in the city. I find the website can be a bit slow to load pages, and it doesn’t seem to cope well if you want to filter your options to a couple of areas, or if you want to change the currency.

Bogota Short-Term Rentals Facebook Group

Bogota Short-Term Rentals is a Facebook page where people advertise all kinds of apartments for rent (short, mid and long-term, in actual fact). You can also post your own ad, specifying what you’re looking for, for how long and at what price. Someone always has something to offer!

Life Afar

Life Afar offers daily and monthly rentals. Their monthly prices start at around $900, so it might be a bit steep for some. However, the apartments are located in nice areas and have been finished to a high standard. This might be an option to consider just for your first month in the city.

Home Exchange

Home Exchange gives you the chance to get some free/very cheap accommodation for a week or two in Bogota or anywhere else in the world because of the free credit you get when you sign up. Home Exchange works along the same lines as Airbnb, except that no exchange of money is involved. It gives you the option either to organise a free home exchange with someone (so you go and stay in someone’s home while they stay in yours), or you can ‘pay’ for the stay with your “Guest Points”.

When you sign up for Home Exchange, you get a certain number of free Guest Points. You then earn more Guest Points if someone ‘pays’ to stay at your place with their Guest Points, or Home Exchange gives you extra points if you refer friends who then register. You have the option of unlisting your own property at any time, and you can also mark when your home is ‘unavailable’.  The great thing is that you get up to 750 free Guest Points when you sign up and complete your profile. Then you can get another 500 points if you verify your account for 25 euros. This means that if you found a place that cost 100 Guest Points per night, you’d potentially be able to use your 1250 Guest Points to stay for 12 nights, and it would have only cost you 25 euros. Use the filters on the website to narrow down your options (eg. select “Secondary” property if you want an entire place to yourself). Enjoy the freebie and maybe even a whole load of free exchanges all over the world in the future!

Booking.com

Booking.com is a well-known website for making hotel bookings. The other day, I was on the Booking website checking the prices of hotels and hostels in Bogotá, thinking that some people who have just arrived in the city would probably prefer to stay in a hotel while they look for long-term accommodation. I found that some hostels were offering beds in dormitories for around $5 dollars a night! So if you’re on a strict budget, you might like to consider that as an option. (They also advertise apartments and nicer hotels, also at pretty good prices, in case dormitories don’t appeal to you!)

Medium-term accommodation

If you are planning to stay for between 2 months – 1 year, I’d suggest these two options: either look for some good deals on Airbnb because some hosts offer generous discounts for stays of more than a month, or register for free on InterNations and have a look at rooms and apartments advertised in the Housing forum. Here you’ll find good value medium-term accommodation, and sometimes people advertise apartments which are available for a couple of weeks (while people go on holiday). It’s also a good option for finding long-term accommodation; you can write a post asking if anyone is renting an apartment/room in a particular area and include your budget and an email address. It’s very likely that you will receive some sort of response, and you might be offered a good deal.

Another great thing about InterNations is the Marketplace forum, where people who are leaving Bogota list all of the furniture they’re selling. If you are on a budget, this can be a good way to pick up a bargain (but not always – sometimes you will find better prices by shopping around the city and buying new).

Looking to buy an apartment in Colombia?

Some people, especially retirees, are looking to move to Colombia indefinitely. I have contacts in Colombia who have been working in Colombian real estate for years. Contact me if you would like me to pass on their contact details.

If you have found this blog informative or entertaining and would like to support How to Bogotá, you can now buy me a digital cup of coffee! 

This blog is a labor of love – I don’t make any money from it. To avoid putting up ads, this is the best and least annoying way I’ve found to offer readers the chance to support How to Bogotá (other than giving me your loyal readership, for which I’m very grateful!)

 

*My link to Airbnb is a referral link, which means that if you don’t already have an Airbnb account, and you then click on my link, sign up and make a booking, both you and I will get some free Airbnb credit 🙂 (the amount varies). This would be useful for me, as I use Airbnb quite often in my travels, and hopefully useful for you too!

** If you use my referral link to click through to Guest to Guest and then register and set up an account, I can get up to 125 free Guest Points, which will help reduce my costs on future trips!

***If you click through to booking.com using my affiliate link and then make a hotel booking, I’ll get a small commission which I can use to help pay for the web-hosting costs of How to Bogotá! 🙂 (if you clicked through and spent $100 dollars on a room, I’d get around $2 – but every little helps!).