Moving to a foreign country, even if for a brief time, is an incredibly intimidating experience.  When you don’t know the language, it can be a thousand times more so.  It’s hard to locate classifieds, to read them when you find them, and to communicate with the posters once you’ve found a listing that you’re interested in.  Not to mention the struggles with trying to figure out the geography of a new country and a new city from thousands of miles away.  Finally, there’s always the stress that the person you’re talking to might just be a scam artist.

The solution, if you can, is to find a local agent who speaks your language and whom you can trust.

For Madrid, Spain, Mike Leppard of Innova is that guy.

When we were preparing to go on sabbatical in 2008, we were going crazy trying to find an apartment.  (Where “we” means mostly “Susan”, who took on the herculean task of apartment-hunting.)  After being abandoned by the university’s “international office” and then weeding through at least a half-dozen clear scams from Craigslist, we were nearly in despair of finding anything at all, let along something that met our needs.

Mike was our savior.  Once we found him, everything was smooth sailing.  His responses were amazingly snappy, especially given the time zone differences.  He walked us through the whole process and negotiated with local landlords on our behalf.

Mike helped us quickly zoom in on an apartment that met exactly our needs.  Because the dollar was in the toilet at the time — and still is as I write this :-P — we were concerned about price.  And we had to have a place that would take our cats, was close to public transit (not too inconvenient to where I would be commuting for my sabbatical), and preferably was both “close to the action” and yet not too noisy.  Finally, because Susan was telecommuting back to her job at MRN, we absolutely had to have broadband internet in the apartment.  All in all, a tall list.  And Mike nailed them all.

When we arrived in Madrid, we were exhausted from days of travel.  The airlines had lost our luggage (of course — we transferred through Heathrow, which made it nearly a lock).  And we were carrying a pile of AmEx travelers’ cheques that we needed to convert to local cash to close on the apartment.  All in all, not a low-stress way to hit the ground.

Mike sent a local he knew to pick us up from the airport and take us to the apartment.  We needed to stop by a bank to change the cheques.  Our driver (who spoke more English than we did Spanish, which is not a high bar to clear) took us to a local bank branch, where we discovered that t.c.’s are not quite as portable as AmEx ads would have you believe.  So now we’re wondering whether we’ll ever see our worldly possessions again, whether we’ll be able to close on the apartment at all, whether we’ll have a place to sleep, etc. etc. etc.

All in all, we were this side of nervous breakdown.

But then Mike stepped in to the rescue.  He came to meet us, on the street after our latest failed bank attempt.  Mike is a friendly, cheerful Brit, and he quickly assured us that everything would work out fine.  He shuttled us down the street to a bank where he “knew someone”.  In the end, he located us a local banker who spoke English and was willing to change some of our cheques.  (The bank’s rules only allowed them to change $1500 — about 1000€ — per day.)  When we were worried that we couldn’t change enough for the full closing fee on the apartment, he again assured us that he’d handle it, and quickly contacted the apartment owner to negotiate it with her.  In the end, she settled for being paid the full amount in installments on successive days.  So, with much relief, we moved in and had a place to sleep that night.

All in all, Mike was worth every cent of his finder’s fee.

But he really went above and beyond the call of duty.  He has stuck with us since, and helped us out in numerous ways.  From getting us oriented to helping us find a pet store for our cats to helping us find Spanish classes, Mike has continued to help us out, far past closing on the apartment.  As I write this, we are in a negotiation with the apartment owner about an accidental appliance breakage in the kitchen, and Mike has helped smooth it out and translate in both directions.  He really seems dedicated to making sure that things work out for us.

The only bit that Mike missed is that we specified that we needed internet access in the apartment when we moved in, and that this was critical for Susan’s work.  And, of course, when we got here — no internet.  It appears that Mike gets this request from everybody he works with, and he didn’t really process that it wasn’t just checking personal email for us — this was absolutely crucial to Susan’s work.  But to his credit, once we impressed the importance of this on him, Mike really did leap in to make it right.  He lent us a cell-modem for a few days to tide us over.  (For which, I think, he got some grief from his partner.)  And he talked to the local telco to get us set up with an ADSL line and short-term contract here.  He really did what he could to make sure that it all worked out.  And now I’m happily writing this review over our recently-installed ADSL line.

And, on top of it all, Mike is a great guy to hang out with and grab a beer with in a lovely Spanish fall evening.