Across the city

Serviced apartments in Hanoi: what the monthly figure actually includes

5 verified serviced apartments to rent across Hanoi, managed by Nest Living.

The monthly figure is not a price until you know what is inside it

A serviced apartment is a service contract with somewhere to live attached, rather than a lease with furniture in it, and that is exactly what makes the headline number hard to compare between buildings. What the word means in Hanoi is reasonably consistent at the centre of the offer: housekeeping and linen changes on a set schedule, building security and maintenance, and usually utilities and internet folded into one monthly invoice. The variation is at the edges, and the edges are where the cost hides.

Three questions turn two quotes into a comparison. What the utility allowance is, and what you are billed above it. How often housekeeping actually comes, rather than how often it is advertised. Whether the management fee sits inside the figure you were given or is added to it afterwards. Ask all three of every building on your shortlist, because the cheapest quote regularly stops being the cheapest once the answers are lined up beside each other.

Looking across the city instead of at one district

Serviced stock is not spread evenly across Hanoi and neither is the demand for it. The districts foreign tenants most consistently choose are Tây Hồ, Ba Đình, Cầu Giấy, Đống Đa and Nam Từ Liêm, and the reason residents give is larger apartments and quieter surroundings than the centre offers. Treat that as a guide to where to start rather than as evidence about any particular building, because the two are not the same claim and only one of them is checkable.

The homes below are the part that needs no generalising. They are the serviced apartments on this website today, in whichever districts they happen to be in, so the comparison you make is between real addresses rather than between reputations. If the district you want is not among them at the moment, an advisor can tell you what is coming up, which is a better use of a morning than checking this page again.

On this website a serviced apartment is filed as a short stay

One thing to know before you touch the filters. Every serviced apartment on this site is filed under short stays, without exception, because that is how the product is classified rather than because of anything any particular landlord has said. A longer term is therefore a question worth putting to an advisor, not something the search has already ruled out on your behalf. If you narrow by lease length first and conclude there is nothing, the filter has told you about our labelling and not about the market.

It is useful in the other direction too. If you have landed on an assignment, or you are buying yourself time to find something permanent, that same classification makes the short stay filter the fastest route to homes that will take you for a few months. The demand for serviced apartments in Hanoi is largely corporate, which market research attributes to foreign investment inflows, and the product has been shaped around people whose employer wants one predictable invoice and who need a bed on the day they land.