Finding a house (and housemates!)

This has to be one of the things I was most worried about when I decided to apply for a masters somewhere I'd never been to before and where I knew no one. I had no idea how I was going to find any housemates, let alone an actual house in an area I knew nothing about. 

Fortunately, everything played out relatively smoothly (apart from one minor blip). 

When I went for my interview the course leader (Simon) explained how the year before he had gathered a list of students who were interested in house sharing and shared this list of names (along with everyone's emails) among everyone, and that it had seemed to be quite successful in helping students find somewhere to live. So he planned to do the same thing this year. My name was added to the list, and I promptly emailed my new classmates who were on the list asking who would be interested in a house share. 

During my interview, I was given a tour of the geography department by two current students. I asked them how they went about finding their accommodation, to which one of the girls told me that after Simon had sent the list out, she volunteered to help people find a place as she was already at Royal Holloway and knew the area well enough to know the process of getting a house there. So after receiving replies from people, some saying they were just going to apply for halls and some saying they were interested, I emailed the the group of people who wanted to house share and asked if any of them were already from Holloway and whether they could initiate a house search. Luckily, a girl called Rachael was and offered to look for a house for the five of us included in the email. 

She was incredibly helpful and organised, and began looking for 5-bedroom houses straight away. Here comes that minor blip I mentioned earlier. She found a lovely looking house that was a good price and would've been perfect for us. Everyone responded saying that we thought it looked great and to go for it. The last person to reply said that they had applied for halls and wanted to wait until they found out if they had a place before committing to a house. Personally, I thought this was ridiculous because why wait for a place in halls when we'd already found a good price house?! But he wanted to do it his way, so unfortunately the rest of us had no choice but to ask him to choose if he was in or out on the house because we all wanted it sorted before the halls places were allocated. He decided on out, and so Rachael was a gem and set about looking for 4-bedroom houses. 

Finally, she found a lovely looking place and we got things rolling with the estate agents; signing paperwork and paying invoices. Tomorrow, I am going to Englefield Green in Egham to collect the keys for our new home for the next year. I'm really excited to see what the house looks like! Photos to come after tomorrow.

Let me know what experiences any of you had as a new postgraduate finding housing.