Fontainebleau is a small town, and the campus sits at the edge of the forest rather than in the centre. Where you live decides how you live here, far more than in a city. This page says where the homes are, what they cost and how renting one works, with the figures of today.
The INSEAD Europe campus is on boulevard de Constance, on the forest side. The centre of town, with its market, its shops and its station for Paris, is a walk away on the other side. Almost everything students rent sits between the two.
Of the 22 homes online today, four are a ten-minute walk from campus or less, ten are between eleven and fifteen minutes, and seven are further. Nothing here is far: the longest walk in the whole catalogue is under half an hour, and it crosses the town centre.
Which side to choose is a real question. Near the campus you gain twenty minutes a day and you are away from the shops. In the centre you live in the town, you walk a little longer, and you are five minutes from the station when you leave for Paris on a Friday.
Rents run from €950 to €3,900 a month, charges included, and ten homes are under €1,200. The spread is wide because the catalogue goes from a studio to a house let room by room.
Two things are paid once, at the start, and they are the ones that surprise people arriving from abroad. The deposit, one month of rent on almost every home here, and the first rent. Both are paid by card when the landlord accepts you, so expect about two months at that moment.
There is no agency fee, because there is no agency: you rent from the owner. Our own service fee is a single fixed amount, whatever the size of the home, and it is paid separately once the rest is settled.
Everything is furnished. A student arriving for ten months does not buy a bed, and a landlord who lets to students knows it. What you need to check is the rest: the kitchen, the washing machine, the internet and the heating, which is the line that moves a budget in winter.
Couples have the hardest time, here as everywhere: five of our homes have two bedrooms or more. It is the scarcest category on this market, because most shared houses exclude couples by design.
A large home can also be let one room at a time. Each room then carries its own rent and its own page, and the shared space is stated separately with how many people share it, so that a fourteen square metre room is not compared to a studio.
Most students sign before they land, and that is the part that worries them: wiring two months of rent to someone they have never met, on the strength of a few emails.
So nothing goes through a private transfer. You send a request on a home, the landlord accepts or declines, the lease is drawn up and signed online, and the first rent and the deposit are paid by card. The money lands on the landlord’s own account, never on ours, and every movement is recorded, including the day the deposit comes back to you.
21 homes are free right now. A landlord answers in his own time, so a request is not a reservation: send more than one if your dates are tight.
INSEAD takes in two cohorts a year, in August and in January, and the housing market of this town follows them. Looking a month before everyone else is worth more than any argument you can make to a landlord.
Lease length is the decision that follows, and it depends on which cohort you join and on what you plan to do with your summer. That question has its own page.