Why did we move five times in five years? Was it by choice or necessity? Well, let me take you on a journey through our rollercoaster of renting in Cuenca, where necessity played the lead role, with a dash of choice sprinkled in. If you’re thinking about renting in Cuenca, or are in the midst of your own rental roulette, you’ll want to hear this.
Rental #1: The Rollercoaster Ride Begins
Our first move to Cuenca was, in a word, chaotic. We were moving from Quito, Michelle’s hometown, and had a tight two-week deadline to find a place before the kids started school. Without a car, we needed a home close to the kids’ school in Challuabamba—a charming area just outside Cuenca.
We found a house that seemed perfect: a beautiful garden, split-level layout, and only a short walk to the school. But like many expats, we quickly learned that not everything is as it seems when renting in Cuenca. Our agent tried to pocket an extra month’s deposit, and our would-be landlord turned out to be less than reliable. When the deal fell through, we were forced to scramble for another option. We eventually found a house, but the problems didn’t end there. Maintenance issues were rampant—think a jacuzzi and fireplace we could never use—and when the landlords started to struggle financially, repairs were simply not happening.
The final straw? The landlord’s husband moved into a shed in our backyard during their divorce, turning our peaceful home into an uncomfortable living situation. That’s when we decided to break the lease, a decision I didn’t take lightly as a lawyer who respects contracts. But in this case, the landlords’ failure to maintain the property broke the agreement, leaving us with little choice but to move on.
Lesson Learned: Avoid renting any property with significant maintenance issues, and be wary of landlords under financial stress.
Rental #2: The Lease from Hell
By the time we were ready for our second move, we had a car and more flexibility in choosing our next home. We still wanted to stay in Challuabamba, so we began the search again. This time, we met an agent named Esteban Velez, who impressed us with his professionalism and genuine care. He showed us a lovely house, but as we started reviewing the lease, things got weird.
The lease was heavily skewed in favor of the landlord, with clauses that could terminate our tenancy at the drop of a hat, along with penalties that bordered on the absurd. When we discovered the landlord was trying to charge us double for security services, we knew we had to walk away. But what stood out was Esteban’s integrity—he fought back against the landlord on our behalf, even firing them as a client when they refused to budge. Esteban’s actions earned him our trust, and he later became a key partner in our real estate venture, YapaTree Properties.
Lesson Learned: Always scrutinize lease agreements carefully, and work with agents who have your best interests at heart.
Rental #3: Family Ties and Construction Woes
Our third rental took us back to Challuabamba, this time into a family-oriented urbanization. The setup was charming—a large extended family had subdivided their land, and we found ourselves in a safe, close-knit community. It was ideal for our young kids, who loved the freedom to play outside in a secure environment.
But just when we thought we’d found the perfect place, we came home one day to find huge holes dug around our property. Construction was about to start on a neighboring plot, completely cutting off our kids’ play area. The worst part? No one had mentioned a thing about this at our homeowners association meetings. When we pressed our landlord, we were told it was “out of their hands.” The lack of communication and disregard for our living situation made it clear—it was time to move again.
Lesson Learned: Try to stay informed about any potential developments or construction near your rental property.
Rental #4: Embracing City Life
After three moves in Challuabamba, we decided it was time to try city life. We found a lovely home in Primero de Mayo, near the Yanuncay River—a spot we instantly fell in love with. We enjoyed daily walks by the river, and the kids thrived in the vibrant, family-friendly neighborhood.
This house had it all: a great green space, reasonable rent, and most importantly, a professional and respectful landlord. But as Michelle’s pregnancy progressed, the three-story layout became a challenge. With the master bedroom on the third floor, we knew the constant up-and-down would be too much with a newborn. So, we made the tough decision to move once more, prioritizing convenience and comfort for our growing family.
Lesson Learned: Consider your family’s needs and lifestyle when choosing a rental, especially if you expect changes in the near future.
Rental #5: Finding Balance
And here we are, in our fifth and current home back in Challuabamba. This time, we knew exactly what we wanted – a modern, low-maintenance space that would allow us to focus on welcoming our new baby. We found a beautiful, open-plan house with lots of light and, finally, the jacuzzi we’d been dreaming of.
While I miss the convenience of living in Cuenca, the trade-off has been worth it. We’re back in a familiar area, but in a home that truly meets our needs. The relationship with our new landlord is off to a good start, though we’re cautiously optimistic, having learned from our past experiences. The daily commute into Cuenca is a small price to pay for the comfort and peace of mind we’ve found in this house.
Lesson Learned: Know your priorities and be willing to compromise to find the right balance between location, comfort, and convenience.
Wrapping Up
After five moves in five years, each with its own set of challenges and lessons, I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge about renting in Cuenca. From dealing with difficult landlords to navigating tricky lease agreements, our journey has been anything but boring. But these experiences have also equipped me with the insights I now use to help other expats through YapaTree Properties.
If you’re considering a move to Cuenca, or are currently facing rental challenges, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to share more of what I’ve learned—and maybe help you avoid some of the bumps in the road that we encountered along the way.
Further reading:
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5 MOVES IN 5 YEARS – MY CUENCA RENTING EXPERIENCE (TRANSCRIPT)
Jason
00:00
Why did we move five times in five years? Was it by choice or necessity? I’m going to say that it was mostly by necessity, with a little bit of choice thrown in.
We’ve created a lot of content on renting properties in Cuenca, but this is the first video that focuses on my own renting experience. It’s my hope that after watching this video, you’ll have a few more things to watch out for when choosing your next rental and in particular how to deal with landlords here. Vamos.
00:38
We’ve been in this current house for about 3 days now and we love it. It just really suits our family and lifestyle. We’re really hoping that this is our final move until we’re able to settle into our forever home. I am currently selling my apartment in Melbourne, Australia to free up some funds so that we can buy here in Cuenca. And one of the main reasons I will buy is to get out of this constant rental roulette that lots of expats that move to Cuenca seem to find themselves playing.
01:08
As rental agents, we do know all the tricks of the trade, but that doesn’t mean that we’re immune to many of the same issues other expats face. To illustrate, I’m going to walk through each of the rentals that we’ve had here and the reasons that we’ve moved from each.
House number one. This was probably our most stressful move because we were coming from our apartment in Quito where Michelle is from, and we also had a fixed time frame. The kids were due to start school, so we needed to find a place in about two weeks.
01:40
We also didn’t have a car at the time which wouldn’t normally be a big issue, but we really wanted to be close to the kids school in Challuabamba which is about 15 minutes drive from Cuenca. So just physically visiting houses was a bit of an issue for us. We had four possible options that we were interested in. Three of these fell apart, one at the last minute just as we were looking to secure it by paying a deposit.
02:05
The agent demanded we paid 2 months deposit directly to her. We communicated with the owner and they told us that we should only be paying one month’s deposit and wasn’t aware of the additional month’s deposit. Yes, the agent was just planning on pocketing that additional month’s deposit. We had a strong discussion with the agent and right then and there we started compiling our own little blacklist of agents that we would never work with again.
02:34
That landlord also ended up being quite flaky so we reluctantly backed out and continued our search elsewhere. The house we settled on looked really really good for us. It was a short walk to the kids school in the Challuabamba area. The gardens were amazing and it had this really generous split level layout. They have been trying to sell this house for around four hundred thousand dollars which I do think that is very much overpriced, but they did agree to rent it too to ask for around $700 a month plus bills.
03:08
And this is a house so there was no HOA or aliquota. The bills added up to another $60 or so every month well, well, most months. At one point there was some construction going on at one of our neighbors and we’re pretty confident that somehow, somewhere one of the construction companies was siphoning off our power as there were a couple of months in a row where the electricity bill was around $100. And this is just way off where it should have been.
We really wanted that house to work for us long term. I spent money clearing a bit of overgrown scrub and putting in some raised garden beds.
03:45
We were literally putting down some roots. But as we were doing so, we were told of the change to our agreement. Turns out the husband and wife were going through a divorce and the husband was now going to be living right with us in effectively our backyard. The idea was that this little shed was effectively supposed to be only used on the weekends for cooking purposes. I think they owned a bakery or something like that, and so there was no real fence or physical boundary stopping our new landlord neighbor from invading our space.
04:19
We had to lay some new ground rules with him and he’s somewhat obliged and it was far from ideal, but we could almost put up with that.
The big issue at this property was maintenance. On paper, we had a luxury house complete with the jacuzzi and a fireplace. We were never able to use either. As part of our rental agreement, we included an annex of around 20 maintenance items that the landlords agreed to fix. Some were very small things like light globes that needed replacing, but others did require some investment from the landlords.
04:56
The project manager in me even drew up a little Gantt chart complete with milestones and very reasonable time frames for all of these items to be fixed. It was all agreed to. From the 20 items, I think they only addressed one or two. The rest were simply too much effort or required the owner to pay for something. We must have asked them over 20 times within the first two months for updated timelines and some sort of action plan, but no, we got crickets. We found out later that the owners were under significant financial stress and were basically using our rent money as their main income source, which they also needed to pay for another rental in Cuenca.
05:42
They simply didn’t have the money to make the repairs and we as the tenants were stuck in a pretty rough spot. We were now overpaying for a property that was not being maintained and decided to move out. We did break the lease and it is really not something I wanted to do and as a qualified lawyer I do have the highest respect for contracts. But we were also quite comfortable arguing that the maintenance issues were really at the heart of the agreement and the owners broke this agreement, leaving us free to move out without penalty.
06:15
And the big lesson here is just don’t rent any property that has significant maintenance issues. At the very least, make sure that any of the more expensive repairs are completed before you make a commitment. And if the owner is under considerable financial stress, I simply wouldn’t go near the property.
06:41
On to house number two. By now we had purchased a car so our options opened up a little bit as we didn’t need to be so close to the school anymore. We still wanted to be in the Challuabamba area so we started doing the rounds with various agents and it was during this search that we stumbled upon one of the main agents that we now work with at Yapa Tree Properties. Esteban Velez doesn’t really do many rentals at the moment but back then he was doing quite a few more and this agent always impressed me.
07:10
He was very detailed, he had followed processes, and he actually cared about us as potential tenants. We found a very nice house with him and proceeded to review the lease agreement. This is where things got weird. Michelle and I referred to this as the lease from hell. It was incredibly 1 sided in favor of the landlord and I have written an article about it including the specific clauses that we objected to and I will link to this in the description.
07:39
But from memory the main issue was that the landlord could basically terminate the lease for any reason and then apply multiple penalty layers on top if we refuse to vacate. This house also came with security fences. The landlord showed us their true colors by changing one of the terms of the contract from paying the security company directly to paying the landlord for this Security Service.
We contacted the exact same security company with the exact same product and found out that the landlord was basically having us pay him double their fees. Now, at this point, we weren’t really surprised that we’d uncovered this sort of dodgy behavior from this landlord, but we were very surprised to find that our agent, Esteban Velez, had our back during this entire time. He fought back hard against the landlord during the contract negotiations. Esteban recognised how unreasonable the landlord’s contract was, and when the landlord refused to start over with a contract that wasn’t heavily in his favor, Esteban fired this landlord as a client. That showed real integrity.
08:54
We had taken up a bunch of Esteban’s time as a client and he walked away without a sense and basically lost a listing too. And this was the first truly positive experience I’d had with an agent in Cuenca, and so he was the first agent I approached when we decided to focus on our real estate service through Yapa Tree Properties. We’ve worked with him forever since and I’m truly grateful to call him a friend.
We ended up renting a house through another agent and the experience was the complete opposite. The landlord was fantastic and reasonable, but the agent was, let’s just say, not fantastic nor reasonable.
09:38
And this really did put us in a tough spot. We wanted the house, but we were now basically forced to go through the agent, and probably the most unsettling issue was just how the agent was putting a lot of pressure on us to sign the agreement, but then refused to have it notarized until we threatened the agent with legal action. I’ve since learned that this agent has numerous lawsuits against her, but most worrying is that I still see a lot of expats recommend this particular agent in various Facebook groups, and Ecuador’s defamation laws don’t really allow constructive feedback so I’m pretty much stuck.
10:23
So the agent is now effectively free to continue doing what they did to us to other unsuspecting expats and being completely transparent, this experience was one of the reasons we decided to help expats rent and buy properties here. That is to be the positive change that we really do want to see in Cuenca’s property markets.
But once we said goodbye to this agent, we had a great initial 12 months in the house. It was perfect for us. The landlords were very good with maintenance issues and this is where we spent a lot of time during COVID and where we’re just so incredibly grateful that we had this large house with a large backyard, a lot of fruit trees, vegetables and just hummingbirds galore.
11:06
It literally was our sanctuary. We had a fantastic relationship with our genuinely lovely Cuencano landlords until they also started to run into money issues partly caused by COVID. They were still very nice to us but something just felt a little bit off. We had a maintenance issue and we were out of town so we did agree for the landlord to send someone over to fix it whilst we were away. And it turns out the maintenance person, it was actually a family member, and they sent that family member along with other family members to check out the house. And we know this because we had our neighbors checking in for us. And then about one month later, we received notice that they were going to sell and we had to move out.
11:54
Now guess who the buyer was? Yep, it was the maintenance man. He was clearly there to inspect the property and he brought the family along for additional feedback. When selling property to Cuencanos, it’s really quite common for the family to also come and give their opinions. It can be quite frustrating because it can easily kill a sale if any of the family members, even if they’re not going to live there, don’t like the property for whatever reason. So yes, we had to move out and we didn’t really want to, but I think what was most frustrating is that by now we considered these landlords as our friends and the deception did hurt us quite a bit.
12:38
We get that they wanted to sell the property and if honestly they were just upfront with us from the start we would have happily helped them, but I guess they just didn’t really want to take that risk.
12:54
Our third property was also in Challuabamba but this house was in a private urbanization. It was more like a family based urbanization and what I mean by this is that at one point all the land was owned by a couple, but as their family grew they subdivided the land and each child basically got their own plot of land. Now this can be a 2 sided sword depending on the family. For example, we really liked being surrounded by this extended family unit. I’m not saying that they invited us in as part of the family or anything like that, but still it was just really nice to see the family dynamics play out and especially the respect they all had for the grandmother who was clearly the matriarch of the family.
13:39
The other side is that we now had to deal with family politics. We had little home owners association style meetings for the urbanization and it’s clear we were only getting part of the story, sometimes. This turned out to be the reason we left. This house was similar to the others in that it was 3 bedrooms plus an office. It came with some green space, but what really sold us was the safety of the urbanization.
14:07
General safety with fences, cameras and everything like that is great, but we do have a young family that loves bikes, skateboards, and just generally causing chaos outside. So it was the freedom for the kids to roam outside within the safety of the urbanization that we really cared about. We had a good relationship with the landlord. They were great with maintenance issues and generally nice people.
14:32
But one day we came home to find huge holes around the perimeter of our property boundary line. In particular, our kids now had to jump over this huge hole to access the vacant plot of land that they’ve been playing on for the previous year. One of our kids was learning to walk at the time, it was just an absolute nightmare. We were basically now trapped by the new construction that was about to commence right on our doorstep and there was zero communication to us about this. We’d attended all the HOA meetings and read all the group chat messages. Nothing was ever mentioned about this new construction.
15:12
When we pushed our landlord on this issue, they basically said, “Yeah, that piece of land belongs to our brother and there’s nothing we can do about it.” And our response of, “Well, you certainly should have told us about it”, didn’t really go down too well. And so we started looking for another place the very next day and that relationship went up in smoke immediately.
Are you starting to see a theme here? The relationship with your landlord matters. A lot.
15:42
It’s the number one piece of advice I give to all the tenants that rent through us.. Try to foster a good working relationship with your landlord. This doesn’t mean you need to be the best friends, but the bare minimum is being very respectful towards them. Now what does that mean in reality? Well, let’s start with your communication style. Chances are you’ll mostly be communicating by WhatsApp text because you probably don’t speak great Spanish and they probably don’t speak much English.
16:12
Texting is just easier to translate. When expats have an issue, we can be very quick to jump into quite an aggressive tone. Don’t do this. Start your messages in a very polite way and be very sure to include proper salutations. “Buenos dias. Como estas”, that sort of stuff and then lead into the issue in a very non threatening way. So let’s say you’re having issues with the calefon or the hot water not working properly.
16:40
It’s hot, cold, hot, cold and this is a very common issue and the landlord probably needs to send someone out around to complete maintenance on the calefon. So saying something like “It’s so cold today and we seem to be having some issues with the calefon not working. Would be very grateful if you could help by sending someone over to fix the calefon.” Now that has a much better chance of getting the result you want then “Hey, the calefon is broken, come fix it.”
17:09
This is very much a cultural thing and picking this up will also help you understand other social situations better as well.
I’m going to run through houses four and five very quickly.
17:26
House four was a really big change for our family. We moved from Challuabamba into Cuenca in an area called Primero de Mayo near Quinta Lucrecia. We wanted to see what city life would be like and our family thrive there. We just loved, loved, loved the Yanuncay River and went walking along it every day. It is a really great area for expats, particularly those with families. We were paying $700 a month plus bills for a three bedroom house.
17:53
We still have a fantastic relationship with the landlord. This landlord couple were very professional and treated their property like an investment. They were very quick with any maintenance issue and generally treated us with respect. We returned that respect and had a great working relationship. The house had a great green space and a lot of other positives, but we ultimately made the decision to leave because it’s a three level house with a lot of stairs and Michelle is currently seven months pregnant. And so we did make the decision to move around month four of the pregnancy when it started to get harder for Michelle to go up and down the stairs.
18:32
The master bedroom is on the 3rd floor, so when the baby is born there is just going to be a lot of up, down, up, down, up, down that we could really live without. So we reluctantly decided it was once more time to move. And that brings us to where we are today.
18:53
Our priorities are really now on welcoming the new baby in a modern space that just works. We can’t afford to be playing around with any maintenance issues and being completely honest, we also just wanted a nicer place and we’re willing to pay for it. We do currently pay $800 a month for this 3 bedroom house which includes Internet. It is very early days, but the relationship with the landlord is very workable. They agreed to most of our requests, but they did deny a couple with that reason that we thought were quite reasonable. So perhaps it’s a little too early to tell, and I certainly will be posting an update if the relationship does change significantly.
19:36
We do love this house and chose it for the house itself. It’s very modern, open plan with lots of light. The only real negative, for me at least, is that we’re back in Challuabamba. I say this as a negative because we were really enjoying the convenience of life in Cuenca for the entire family. I don’t think the quality of life in Challuabamba is a step backwards at all.
19:58
But the reality is that I now do have to come into Cuenca everyday for business. So it does add another 30 minutes of travel time to my daily schedule which I’d rather do without.
But that is all OK because we finally got the jacuzzi that we wanted. And so that’s our journey of renting in Cuenca thus far. We have learnt so much as tenants. Combine this with the experience gained from helping hundreds of expats find their own rentals. I do think we pretty much know every trick in the book. So do feel free to contact us for help with your next property purchase or rental in Cuenca.
20:36
We would love to help just like we helped these guys find their place.
Ciao ciao.
One Response
I can definitely relate — I’m in my 10th home in 10 years. Of course I only stayed 3 to 4 months in a few of them, and over three years in a couple of others. Most of the early move-outs were due to problems similar to what you mentioned. But I learned early on, when a new Ecuadorian friend helped me edit my first lease to take out things that were either illegal or unethical. Since then, I’ve revised every lease I’ve signed, inserting important protective language, and getting rid of predatory-ish and illegal clauses. Bad leases continue to plague our expats, and in my humble opinion, a bad lease is worse than a bad landlord.