There’s a hidden reason so many Stockholm renters go for Nordic minimalist interiors. In a capital gripped by an acute housing shortage, it’s no fun constantly lugging all your worldly goods from apartment to apartment.

The Swedish capital may be one of the most desirable locations on the planet to be an expat, but once you’ve bagged the dream job, finding somewhere to live brings a whole new set of problems.

The city’s queue for rent-controlled housing is so long that it’s being considered by the Guinness Book of World Records. On average, it takes nine years to be granted a rent-controlled property – and that jumps to two decades in some of the most popular neighbourhoods.

Rooms in existing flat-shares are also incredibly hard to come by, since Sweden has a higher proportion of single-person properties than almost anywhere else in the EU.

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“It’s not like other cities where the people who own apartments never live in them themselves. In Stockholm you’re often in someone’s flat just for the time that they are away,” explains Schaller.

According to Statistics Sweden, the average cost of renting an apartment first-hand in Stockholm is around 6,518 Swedish kronor ($783) per month, with 66 sq m listed as the mean sized property.

By contrast, second-hand contracts can change hands for double that price on the black economy, despite regulations designed to ensure tenants don’t pay much more than the market rate. Prices have also been pushed up since a law change in 2013, allowing private individuals to charge tenants based on their mortgage costs rather than comparable rent prices in the neighbourhood.