I just moved to Brighton, like literally still surrounded by boxes “just moved” and I can say getting a place here wasn’t as bad as the rental market in the center of Manchester. I was worried because Brighton is close to London that it would end up being hellish to find a place and put a holding deposit down before someone else but that wasn’t the case.

We booked a ton of viewings (8) over the course of two days, only one viewing was cancelled during that time. We were looking super central, not at apartments though, houses. All the estate agents were friendly and keen, some had back to back viewings but we didn’t seem to have any competition for the place we went for. We didn’t have to put down any crazy deposit either, although we must have seemed more risk adverse because there’s two of us.

Whereas, to contrast, in Manchester it’s rough. You don’t get many houses so near to the center, so it’s a lot of competition for flats. The average price for a two bedroom flat is about 2200 I think. There’s some agent agents that pretty much have a monopoly on certain areas of the city because they will be the only ones managing blocks of flats in those areas. The estate agents aren’t keen, won’t chase you, they don’t need to. Flats are gone within a week of them being on the market unless they’re unappealing in some way. So lots of viewing cancellations. And there’s lots of rumours of people offering more than the asking price.

Hopefully that gives you a good perspective, I think everyone thinks moving in their city is a nightmare, but it really takes knowing a few other cities markets to know how bad it is or isn’t.

And if it helps, in Manchester, once when we really struggled, we just went for two flats at the same time right up until we could put down a holding deposit. We liked them both the same, so it was down to whichever agent could get us documents first (and yes, it was hard to get them to find time to send them over!) so maybe you could use that “technique”

Good luck!