Trevelin, the town of the mill, a unique place (by the way it is called “TrevĂ©lin”, not “TrĂ©velin” or “TrevelĂn” and even less “TribilĂn”).
Excellent idea to move to Trevelin, there are many people thinking the same thing and you can, you just have to find a way.
The first thing I will tell you is that it is not easy to get a job in Trevelin, the population is not very big, so jobs are not plentiful. The ideal is that you work remotely and live here. Think that a flight Esquel <-> Buenos Aires (capital city) costs USD 140,- so if you have to travel from time to time is relatively affordable.
If you are looking for peace Trevelin is an ideal place. It is super safe. You can ski, fish, go everywhere by bike, live in the countryside, or in the forest, or in the mountains, isolated from the world, inside the town. There are no motorcycles with free exhaust, no cars with loud music, there are very few people in a hurry, you don’t even have traffic lights. People are friendly.
The problem with making these moves is that AirBnB and its friends have broken the rental market, nobody rents permanently. For landlords it is much more profitable and easier to do it through temporary rental platforms, in the summer months they can earn two or three times more than what they earn the whole year having a tenant and the property doesn’t wear them out as much.
It is not that nobody rents permanently, rather, very few people do and you have to be here to rent something.
The options I know of are:
- Buy something from where you live
- Get a friend/relative/acquaintance to rent or lend you something for a while.
- Get a permanent rental
- Renting something semi-permanent (6 to 9 months)
- Renting something temporary and paying for it as tourism
- Buy something once you are here
Our process of coming here was a bit hectic in terms of planning, but one of the things we did was to travel to the area a few times (3) before moving and to come to the mountains a few more times (4). Between the trips and the discovery you get to know how it is “the scene” here, but only a little bit. It is when you have the decision made and you start to activate that you encounter barriers and difficulties. Beyond what you can hear from people you know who are already living here, who made the change, who made the move, nobody is going to get you a place, think about it the other way around (you getting something for someone), if it happens it is only by chance.
For us the main problem was housing. The initial idea was to spend a whole year, to see if we liked it in all seasons, because we knew the mountain range but during the summer, clearly the best season.
We were lucky and we asked in a place where they were building houses, we talked to the owner and builder of the place and we reached an agreement so that he would not rent a house for 6 months. It happened because we asked (he was not in any real estate agency), because he was still building and also because the tourism season 2023 was slow. We closed the deal in October, to come in January.
The initial plan was advanced, it is not sustainable to rent so expensive (same price for a 55m2 house as our 160m2 house in Buenos Aires), but it was the gateway to arrive and settle in, we were very grateful. Of course, we had to hurry to buy something.
It is for this reason that we decided to make this site and look for owners who want to rent “semi-permanently”, so if you want to do the same, ask us and we will put you in contact with those we managed to convince.
