Be born a Swede, get a personnummer, sign up for the queues in all major Swedish cities when you turn 18.^[1] Some of those won’t be free (e.g. to queue in Malmö costs 300:- a year), but who knows where your studies or your work will take you? In a few years you’ll be able to rent.

There were people who got a 2-room apartment in Stockholm in 2019. Here’s how much time (in years) they spent to do so (courtesy of Statistiktjänsten of Stockholm’s Bostadsförmedlingen):

If you have an employer or any kind of network, ask around if anyone knows a landlord or somebody working for one. It happens that when you contact a landlord directly, they have absolutely nothing available, but when their old friend or business partner calls and speaks in Swedish without accent, an apartment materializes in a month or two.

Hunt the smaller landlords. They do exist. Sometimes they own just a couple of buildings and maintaining any sort of a queue is overhead for them. Contact them directly and ask if they have anything. If you have a permanent job and pay your bills on time, they might be happy to have you.

To find out where they are, go to the municipality’s website and look for something like “Bygga och bo”, “Hyresvärdar” or “Hitta bostad”. There will be a list of names, addressed and phone numbers. If you have a particular area in mind or if the internet doesn’t seem to have up-to-date data, just go and look at the buildings — they usually have the name of the caretaker somewhere.

If none of this works, an alternative to förstahandskontrakt is andrahandskontrakt — renting from someone who got lucky to get a förstahandskontrakt or who has their own apartment. These contracts are more expensive and always temporary: for example, to be able to rent out an apartment one owns, they have to have a reason like a one-year job contract in another municipality. On the bright side, andrahandskontrakt apartments are usually furnished.