Maia Kenney was living in Utrecht, the centrally located city in the Netherlands, while she built a career in the art world. At first, she was sharing an apartment with her partner. But last spring they broke up, and Ms. Kenney needed to move \u2014 fast.<\/p>\n
An American and Polish citizen, Ms. Kenney, 34, grew up in Boulder, Colo., but also lived on and off in Poland, where her mother is from. She wound up in the Netherlands after her father suggested a program at University College Utrecht, and returned to Utrecht a few years after graduation to get her master\u2019s degree in art history.<\/p>\n
[Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com<\/a>. Sign up here<\/a> to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]<\/p>\n Putting her Polish passport to use, she was able to stay in Europe and spent the next six years developing a career as a curator, while also teaching at a design school.<\/p>\n After the breakup, Ms. Kenney weighed her options. She didn\u2019t want to move back to the States, and Utrecht was expensive. Amsterdam, about 30 miles north, was also expensive, but she had a lot of friends in the Dutch capital. \u201cI\u2019d always actually wanted to live here,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a very energetic city.\u201d<\/p>\n Many people her age, especially in the cultural sector, had roommates. That wasn\u2019t going to work with her dog, Pepper, so she decided to try to buy something small on her own. \u201cThis is my chance,\u201d she thought.<\/p>\n She had about 300,000 euros ($350,000) to spend, cobbled together from her savings and some help from family \u2014 \u201can act of love, because I was not in a good situation before,\u201d she said. To save money, she decided to forgo a broker and trawl listings online.<\/p>\n The market was tight and appealing options were limited. Maurits van Leeuwen, a broker in Amsterdam, said most listings in Amsterdam sell for 10 percent over the asking price, and quickly. This was especially true at Ms. Kenney\u2019s price range, in a city without many studio apartments.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people can pay it, so the sellers have a lot of choice in who is buying,\u201d Mr. Van Leeuwen said.<\/p>\n Ms. Kenney looked for a studio with a balcony so Pepper could have outdoor space. Good connections to Amsterdam\u2019s main train station were important, since she often commutes to other parts of the country. But she was primarily focused on neighborhoods, because she knew that with her budget she wouldn\u2019t be getting a ton of space.<\/p>\n \u201cThe city has to be my living room,\u201d Ms. Kenney said.<\/p>\n Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maia Kenney was living in Utrecht, the centrally located city in the Netherlands, while she built a career…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[101],"tags":[199,28230,200,37297,49048],"class_list":["post-93884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-amsterdam","tag-amsterdam","tag-amsterdam-netherlands","tag-netherlands","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","tag-utrecht-netherlands"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116651565341198717","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}