Gist

You wouldn't believe The city with A 20-year's waiting lists for rental homes

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.

Stockholm is Europe’s fastest-growing capital, thanks to record immigration, a thriving start-up scene plus one of the continent’s highest birth rates. All of these factors have seen the wider region’s population grow by almost a quarter of a million in just seven years.