Malaga’s real-estate roundup

Living in southern Spain in Malaga can be amazing if you can afford a nice place. And that is getting harder day by day as most of the people decide to make money by putting their apartments on Airbnb rather than letting them out for long-term. This article won’t be about Airbnb, it’s not my job to decide if that is good for the people or not. This article will be about the…

Super shitty real-estate advertisements, that you can encounter if you look for an apartment in Malaga.

As you might already know from my previous article, that most people here find their places on www.milanuncios.com or www.idealista.com or similar websites. The key is to use big Spanish sites, not small the English sites of real-estate agencies because most of those are simply rip-offs.

However, in my experience, here in Malaga, most of the people have no frickin’ clue how to make a decent photo, even if they walk around with smartphones with high-resolution cameras. Many times the photos are blurry or made from a such an impossible angle that you can’t decide it was made on a space station in zero gravity, upside down of a black hole’s event horizon or the knob of a kitchen cabinet, but in terms of real-estate advertisements, they are both completely useless anyway.

Brace yourself, these are the apartments that I stumbled upon, when I was looking for a flat in Malaga:

Many times when you rent a furnished apartment, it comes with a lot of stuff, that you can’t throw out. Otherwise why on earth would anyone make a photo of this shelf with all the stuff on it, including the TV and VHS from World War II? But seriously, many times, when I tell them: “Hey, I would like to rent the place, but all this stuff, especially the old furniture, must go” then answer “No, you can only rent it with the stuff included. If you want, you can shove everything in one of the rooms.” And when I ask, that “And are you going to pay me for storing all your crap?” They, of course, tell me that they don’t plan to do that.

Ok, so seriously, what is going on this picture? The ugly green square tiles with this diagonal green glass mirror thing and the ?reflection? of a microwave oven are like staring into another (ugly) dimension. The horse head table on the right and the cushions are just the icings on the cake.

What are you cooking? Claustrophobia! – Could be the title of this photo, made of the most depressive and suicidal kitchen in Malaga that I’ve seen so far. Seriously, even just looking at the close walls, ugly furniture and… oh my god, cooking here must feel like being buried alive.

According to this advertisement, the apartment has a fully equipped kitchen with an oven. Well, if we consider that black thing an oven, then technically it’s true, but seriously people… many apartments in Malaga doesn’t have an oven. People don’t make pizzas, don’t make cakes here.

Ok, I get it, you don’t need an oven to make paella and flan, but hey… I saw some guys heating up the frozen ready-made pizzas in a microwave oven. WTF? Seriously? In Italy, they would cut your hands off for that! And the best part is that a basic, but perfectly functioning brand new oven from IKEA is just 100 euros. If someone doesn’t spend that much on their apartment it just shows that they have low standards.

After your eyes stopped bleeding because of the brown color overdose and of course the mandatory cushions in this apartment, let’s address a genius solution here. Just for a second think about it: What would you do when 4 of your friends from Malaga are coming over but 2 of them are short and 2 of them are freakishly tall? As you can see the solution is to have chairs for short and tall people, so at the kitchen top, they can all eat/drink comfortably!

Here, I have to address two things (at least). First of all, who the hell goes to the home depot or god knows any store in Malaga that sells flooring like… Bricomart and start thinking… “I would like a floor that looks like a mental institute from the last century.” Or maybe it’s just me, thinking that these checked floors are super ugly because I played too much with this game:

Seriously… red and white square tiles? What is wrong with you people of Malaga? After this obviously rhetorical question, let’s focus on the fitness dining table for a moment. If you can’t fit in between the wall and the table comfortably, you are too fat to live this mental cross-fit apartment.

I hear you say: “But you can move the table from the wall, duh!” well, yes, that is true, but then you don’t have enough space to enter the living room from the kitchen. Moving the table every time you have dinner is quite idiotic in my opinion, but wait… maybe that’s why the checked mental institute floor tiles?

Nice, modern kitchen! Oven, electric stove, washing machine, but… how do you wash the dishes? Maybe you need to put them to the washing machine and use the sink only as a dryer?

I get it. Grandma died and they want to make some money from the apartment, putting it online, available for long-term rent, but as usual, they don’t want to get rid of the furniture. One time, when I went to check out an apartment, in the bedroom there was a huge black wooden wardrobe. It was even bigger than this cabinet. I was wondering that if I open it’s door what is more likely to happen:

1.) A corpse is falling off
2.) I find the secret passage to Narnia
3.) Millions of bats flying off
4.) Nothing, until the evening when the monsters start coming out…

Of course, everyone has different preferences, personally, I prefer not licing in a haunted museum.

Seriously, I have no idea what is going on, in the picture above. First of all, you can’t have nightstands. After you finished reading your book in the evening, or you just want to put your favorite dildo away, you have to get up, open the wardrobe door and put your stuff away, then get to the bed. But that is not what I don’t understand… why there is a huge horizontal crack through the floor? And why there is a landing strip in front of the bed? It’s like a mini runway where you can gain speed before jumping to the bed? Finally, this is the kind of floor that you can never clean. I mean, yes you can, but because of its pattern, it just looks dirty all the time. Perfect for lazy people, since it’s impossible to tell that it’s dirty or freshly mopped.

Let’s say you have a party with your friends over and you want to grab a beer. You don’t have to go to the kitchen, you can just grab one from the sofa. This is the perfect bachelor apartment ever, including the mandatory cushions.

We are still in the same apartment from the previous photo, but now a different angle, to show you how perfect that apartment is. As you might notice – if you haven’t that means you’ve never been to a house party – that it doesn’t matter how big or nice is your living room, people always go to your kitchen during a party. I guess people like cozy places where they can hide and creep, plus the cold drinks are close. Anyway, in this apartment you don’t have to worry that your guests will separate into two groups since there is only place for one person in the kitchen. And even that one person can’t open the cabinet door because him/herself is in the way.

If you are into LEGO, Minecraft or 8bit retro games in general, you will love this apartment. I am wondering if I go there it looks like this in real life as well? That would be pretty cool, hands down! But seriously, even if I wanted I could not make these low-quality photos. How is this even possible? You need special skills for this level of fuck-up. And the best is, that for the advertiser, it’s perfectly fine, they don’t see any problem with these photos.

It was hard to choose a photo of this apartment because almost every photo is epic by itself. Leopard pattern kitchen furniture, purple walls, on this photo above you can see black heart-shaped cushions on a red velvet sofa with 80’s psychedelic pattern walls, zebra pattern velvet chair… and then I noticed the Disney tea set on the table, and this next photo of the bedroom…

I just hope that the previous photo was not a secret hideaway of Michael Jackson, but to stay on topic, here is the next advertisement, and it’s on you to decide that it’s a room that you can rent in Malaga or it’s a prison (mental institution) cell?

I understand that living clutter-free is a thing, but this next apartment might be a little bit of overstatement, when it showed up in the search results when I searched for furnished apartments. On the other hand, it’s perfect for Salsa and Bachata classes.

Well, that was my little collection of amazing apartments from Malaga, that I encountered when I was looking for a flat for myself. If you find anything else weird/hilarious/shocking, just drop a link to the real-estate advertisement in a comment and I update the post with new funny photos. Also, feel free to share your experience with rental apartment hunting in Malaga.