Apartment hunting in China is a roller-coaster ride of hits and misses where maintaining a sense of humor and monk-like level of patience is advised. Step one to finding an apartment is finding an agent. This is essential for anyone too busy to hunt down his or her own home away from home.

Browse through the many online expat sites packed with agents ready to move heaven and earth to get people settled. There is no shortage. Set your requirements and budget and try to get close to a subway stop to make getting around town a bit easier.

Agents can vary greatly in terms of quality of service and responsiveness. Some will pick you up from your apartment to escort you to a range of possible homes. But these kind gestures are undermined when you find that they just don't hear you. The more you say "one bedroom," the more you get shown studios. An often-heard quote is, "Just think, you can see your kitchen from your bed." Right, what a thrill that would be.

Others will give you a wink with the perfunctory, "No problem - I know what foreigners want" line after you have explained what you are looking for. You will get dragged around to see a string of apartments way out of your price range, while being urged on with a saccharine, "It's not much money for a foreigner." This category of agent also has problems calculating distance. A promised five-minute walk to Wangfujing subway becomes a 20-minute taxi ride to the same subway stop when you visit in person.

Then there's the hard-nosed, hard-selling agent who will drag you, kicking and screaming, to appalling locations. After stressing the importance of a bathroom with a separate shower section, the odds are you will be shown apartments with postage-stamp-sized bathrooms that come with a bucket and hole-in-the-floor shower. In addition, something billed as being IN Jianguomen, will turn out to be an apartment from which you can SEE Jianguomen – in the distance.

Finally there is the bargain-queen agent who will listen to your requirements, make copious notes and then ask you to buy her dinner to fortify herself before the hard work at hand. This category of agent is prone to be late and keep you waiting with all manner of excuses. But when it comes to haggling with landlords about prices and furnishings, the bargain-queen is in a class of her own. Don't be surprised if, when you finally find what you want, the landlord asks you for a 12-month deposit. Despite your shocked disbelief at this unethical and illegal demand, the landlord will squint and say that single foreign males are a flight risk. Clearly, previous bad experiences with tenants abound. Even pointing out that you have work references and are a vegetarian, non-smoking, non-drinking, Buddhist won't work with this landlord, and even the bargain-queen will eventually accept defeat.

Throughout this long, exhausting process you will learn to check water pressure – if the tap in the kitchen works, it doesn't mean the one in the bathroom will - flush toilets, check gas connections and inspect neighbors.

Then, after weeks of frustration, a work colleague will casually mention in passing that they have a contact who may have something suitable. It invariably turns out to be exactly what you wanted in the first place, and could have saved you an exasperating exercise in self-flagellation. As in all things in life, when finding an apartment in China, it's not what you know, but who you know.