How did you find housing before actually being in the country?

Hired a local buyer's-agent-style service for renters specifically, unusual but worth it given how remote and rushed the whole process was for me.

Did anyone find the estate agents themselves were reliable sources of honest neighbourhood advice, or purely sales-focused?

Mixed experience for me — one agent was genuinely helpful and candid, another was purely trying to close whatever was on their books that week. Worth getting a second opinion regardless.

Adding my experience because I did this as a single mum with a three-year-old, which changes the calculation a lot.

I couldn't do the short-term-first approach for long, because moving a small child twice in two months felt worse than the risk of a flat that wasn't perfect. So I did a hybrid. I booked four weeks in a serviced apartment, and during the two months before the move I did video viewings every weekend. I asked each agent the same list of questions and kept notes in a spreadsheet, so I could compare them properly instead of relying on how nice the photos were.

What made the difference was asking for things the photos can't show: the walk to the nearest nursery, whether the street was busy at night, how long the hot water took, what the building's noise was like at dinner time. One agent refused to do a second video call and I dropped that flat immediately. I signed the lease in my second week in Porto, after one in-person viewing, and I'm still happy with it.

So Priya's thread is right, but if you have a small child, a short stay plus very organised remote viewings might be the more realistic version.

Very useful, Ana. We're doing four weeks of temporary rental in Canada too. Did anyone find a reliable way to check which school a specific address belongs to, before signing?

In our city the school board had a lookup tool by address, and it was accurate. Ask the landlord as well, they get that question all the time.

Short-term first is still the best advice in this thread.

Ana, the spreadsheet of identical questions is smart. I did the opposite, relied on vibes, and it mostly worked by luck.