Having had the experience of living in a DUWO acco...

Having had the experience of living in a DUWO accomadate room for one year now, I have to say that the step that comes after renting a duwo room is living on the street. Duwo is a Company tries to suck out everything out of the housing shortage in The Netherlands. I can t believe that such an organization is allowed to call themselves a foundation of public utility. First of all they force international students into a kind of adhesion contract - you must rent the room for an entire year, there is no possibility to quit the renting agreement before the predetermined end date. In my case that meant I had to obligate myself to pay them more than 4000 rent over the year for a room that I haven t even seen before - you are forced to buy a pig in a poke. But of course, if you are coming from abroad and you know that finding a house, especially in Amsterdam can be quite tricky, you think that this is the best option. Now, I clearly know why this is the case: Nobody wants to stay in their shitholes for one year, but in order to make profit, they just make this somehow mandatory. Isn t it great how they suck out money out of international students? Also, Duwo is not cheap, for a 12 squaremeter rooom in a shared apartment far away from the city center you still pay around 400 per month - this is more than I know pay for my independent apartment (incl rent allowance, which is another thing they do not mention at all - if you rent an independent apartment you might be eligible for rent allowance from the tax administration)
If the rooms would at least be of good quality I would not even be so upset about this.
But their customer service is a catastrophe. As I entered my room for the first time I got hit by the smell of cold cigarette smoke immediately. There were red-brown spots on the wall and there was an old sofa standing on my balcony. The tiles of the shower room were covered with disgusting dirt, and every attempt to clean it failed - I think that nobody cleaned this apartment for the last 10 years. As I called them, they said to me at the phone that this are just minor things - keep in mind that you have to live there for ONE ENTIRE YEAR! I don t know how you should call it but you definitely cannot call it living, it s more counting the the days until you finally can move out.
Since the beginning my mailbox was very hard to open, and after one month the lock in ther broke completely so it was not possible anymore to close it. I called them several times because of this - nothing happened. Everybody could have grabbed my post during the year; credit cards, pincodes, official letters, private mails EVERYTHING. And it s still broken - and I m not going to pay for this - that s for sure! And the biggest joke that made me laugh and cry at the same time was the email with the cleaning instructions they sent me a few weeks ago - I just thought: NOBODY EVER DID THIS IN THIS ROOM! So don t expect me to do so. I m done with DUWO, I started renting an apartment with DeKey, it was dirty as I moved in, I called them and they cleaned it up within one week and refunded me the rent for this week - I don t expect this but this is good customer service, this is how you create customer loyalty. But hey, DUWO does not need this because they will continue forcing international students who sometimes travelled over oceans to come here to sign adhesion contracts, without any chance to withdraw them. I m really sad that this is your business model, to take advantage out of the fear of not finding a shelter.
My suggestion: as soon as you are planning to study in The Netherlands sign up at studentenwoningweb.nl, so you can accumulate some waiting time, and try to find an apartment there or try to find one at kamernet, everything is better than DUWO.