How to rent an apartment in Kazakhstan 

How to rent an apartment in Kazakhstan? One word: Krisha. 

The Krisha.kz website is one of those Kazakh things that work extremely well. 

I’d used it before in Almaty, and you get to look up houses and apartments using a wide range of search terms, then call the landlord or agent and go to view it. 

The other good thing is once you’ve called a few estate agents, if you don’t like the first property you’re then on their list for anything else that comes up. 

When I first moved to Kazakhstan I didn’t have a clue about how anything worked and ended up making a few expensive mistakes with accommodation, not to mention getting cheated by a couple of agents. I always use Krisha now. (Note: this isn’t a promotion, I just really like Krisha.)

It’s also a good idea to have plenty of options to view as I’ve noticed that rental apartments in Kazakhstan sometimes have a very strong taste of the owner in the decor rather than the neutral decor of western apartments. 

However, this wouldn’t work if you don’t speak Russian or Kazakh, as few of the agents speak English. 

How to search

It allowed you to search by type of building (house, brick apartment block or “monolithic” apartment block), type of decor (standard or “euro remont”), number of rooms, location, price, whether there was an internet connection, and so on. 

I was looking for a “euro remont” apartment, which meant there would most likely be a fitted kitchen or at least one that had been installed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in an apartment block – “brick” basically meant a smallish apartment block, while “monolithic” was used to describe the huge new developments that had sprung up since Astana was made the capital. Since I worked from home, an internet connection was essential. 

The first apartment I visited was in the Grand Astana, an enormous half-built development near the Pyramid of Peace and Reconciliation, yet another exotic structure built by the British architects Foster and Partners for a conference on world religions, also housing an opera theatre and art gallery. 

At the Grand Astana

The Grand Astana had a group of towers grouped around a courtyard. There were a few kids playing there, and one or two groceries open, but it was very much in the middle of nowhere on land recently reclaimed from the steppe with no other buildings around. After asking a few people, I eventually found the right tower (there were no numbers on the doors yet) and took the lift up to the 28th floor. 

The owner, a pleasant middle aged Kazakh woman, showed me around. It was all brand new, very spacious, with chandeliers hanging from the ceilings in the bedroom and sitting room, though there was also a bucket collecting drips from the bathroom ceiling. 

There was something rather gloomy about the huge grey-painted rooms, and I’d have to take a bus to the nearest supermarket. In fact I had to stand on the road outside for quite a while until I could get a taxi to drop me back at the Baiterek. 

I didn’t want to live in the Grand Astana but as I continued looking on Krisha over the next few days and failed to make any more appointments I began to think it wasn’t too bad. In the end I rang the owner back and said I’d like to take it, but by then it had already been let. 

A flat a view

The second flat I looked at was in another half-built estate, also not far from the Pyramid but closer to the old town. Surprisingly for Astana, where most new buildings are big and boxlike, built by huge Chinese or Turkish firms, this flat had character.

It was on the top floor of the 10-storey building, with a quirkily shaped entrance hall, a large living room with a brand new fitted kitchen along one wall, and a bedroom with a view across the construction sites to the left bank skyscrapers.

The windows on the other side – it was on the corner of the building – looked out to the Pyramid, the huge white Nur-Astana mosque and beyond that to the empty steppe. 

There was almost no furniture – just a bed, a table and chairs and a  double wardrobe – which was a plus because the more expensively furnished a Kazakhstani rental flat is, the more likely it is to be full of hideous tat. Unusually, the landlord didn’t seem to have imposed his taste on the flat at all, so the walls were plain white and there were no paintings or ornaments. I liked it. 

Fortunately the landlod, a stocky Kazakh of about my age, also liked me, or at least the chance to rent his apartment to a foreigner. Foreigners – or at least westerners – are fairly or not seen as prompt and reliable payers, who moreover won’t move in dozens of relatives. 

I moved into the new flat five days later.