Acquiring accommodation in Breda (for students)

Right now navigating the housing market in Breda is absolute hell. I want to write this post to be able to help people who are moving in right now and talk about (in my opinion) the best way to find accommodation. I will present a few great options for finding houses, what to look out for, and talk about/review Xior Student Housing a lot because that’s where I’ve been living for the past 9 months. I’ll sort the options in order of recommendation but since it’s very difficult I incur you to be involved with all of them in some way:

First of all, I’ll start with Xior Student Housing:
– link to their housing options in Breda
– link to their booking website

Even though my experience at Xior hasn’t been pleasant at all I would still recommend applying to them because of how difficult finding ANY options is. Once you’re settled in you can browse other places and go on viewing. Xior are great for international students because of how quick and easy getting a room is. They have 4 buildings in Breda which offer accommodation. I will list their options in ascending order of price:

• The cheapest building is the one on Kraanstraat 1 – 9. What this building offers you is a room with a sink with cold water only + a shared kitchen, bathroom, and toilets. Those are shared between the people on your floor which may vary. In my case, those are 8. It’s located right at the center of the city which can be both a pro and a con.

Here I would like to open a bracket about the Kraanstraat building & Xior and talk about it since I live there.
Because it’s located right in the center of the city, it’s extremely loud during the night or on any party holidays like Carnaval or King’s Day. For that same reason, it’s also EXTREMELY dirty. Dutch party culture has the mindset of throwing their garbage on the ground with the expectation that someone else will clean up after them. That is also what a few of your roommates in the building will believe with the exception that the cleaning up is just surface level and a lot of the filth remains. I’ve never seen the kitchen get cleaned up once by the cleaning staff, it’s always us. It’s also dirty because people leave their things there but that’ll happen everywhere with irresponsible roommates.

Here is an example of that 2 days after I moved in:

Translation: “Can you guess where the party was? … and this is the bathroom.”

I would also like to show you the kitchen I saw when I moved in.

Both of those seem to have gotten better nowadays but it was horrible when I moved in. It took a long time and many calls with Xior Management to get anything to happen. I eventually got used to the dirtiness and by spending as little time as possible in those rooms it’s liveable. The rent is not high, but for what you receive it’s not really worth it.
Finally, because the management of Xior is not that great you get a lot of freedom, simply because nobody cares enough to reinforce rules. You rarely get contacted about things and you can do whatever you want to. A few of my roommates throw parties often and I invite people over to hang out in my room or the musty kitchen. End of the bracket.

I have close friends living in all the other buildings of Xior and thus I know a tiny bit about them:

• The second option is the building located on Tramsingel 21. It offers a room, very similar to Kraanstraat but in addition to that, you get a sink with hot and cold water and a personal shower. Also, the shared kitchen is a bit more equipped.
• The third (best option in my opinion) is the building on Rat Verleghtstraat. It offers an entire studio for yourself for the relatively low price (for a studio) of 650 euros total. That means that you get a personal kitchen and bathroom. You also get a few pieces of necessary furniture while in the other buildings you have to buy everything yourself.
• Finally, the big (and most expensive) building is on Tramsingel 27 and it offers only studios. Keep in mind that the rent there is really expensive (750+), but it is an option. I have friends there who rented out a room there because else they wouldn’t’ve gotten anything.

That’s enough for Xior.

These next few paragraphs will be about time-based accommodation. Those are places where I advise you make an account / sign-up on the waitlist as soon as possible because your luck of getting a place depends on the time you’ve been signed up. Those two are T63 and KlikVoorKamers. The rent for the accommodation offered on those websites is surprisingly great.

I’ll start with KlikVoorKamers. They offer accommodation in Breda and Tilburg and are a very popular choice for finding things. The accommodation offers just pop up and you have to sign-up to get on the waiting list. There are 3 ways to get in which the order of who gets offered the room gets determined. The first and most popular one is sorting by registration time. Meaning that if someone has an account on KlikVoorKamers for 2 years and another for 1 year, the offer will be sent first to the older account. Other than that you have “draw” and “first responder”. Draw randomly selects someone from the waiting list and “first responder” is pretty self-explanatory. I also like it because almost all offers have a floor plan which gives you an idea of what you’re getting. Xior doesn’t have that and I had no clue what I was getting myself into when I signed up.

As for T63, the only problem with them is the waiting list. They offer 3 types of studios which they call M, L, and XL. M Studios are shared between 2 people and you sign up for them with a friend. L and XL are personal. You can see more about what they offer here. For what you get the pricing is reasonable and I would advise you to sign up for an L studio immediately and/or find a friend and together sign up for an M studio.

As an international, I don’t recommend the usual websites. I’ve had 0 luck with Kamernet or Kamer.nl. I’m almost sure it’s not because of a skill issue because I had a nice friendly introduction message and I’ve sent 100+ offers over 1 month. I got about 2 – 3 responses and almost all of them wanted an in-person viewing which made it difficult since I was searching from home then.

Finally, I’d like to talk about Facebook and finding accommodation from there. I didn’t find much luck there too so I can’t really recommend it. There are a few groups that I got into (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3) and I sent a few offers. A solid 80% of the responses I got were scams. To make sure of the validity of the people you talk to I recommend reverse image searching the profile picture, the pictures of the rooms that you get, and googling their phone number and name. There are a lot of websites and forums which have encountered those same people and have exposed them as scammers. Also, don’t send any money beforehand.

That’s about it from me! Good luck.
If you have any additional questions feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.