In addition to being expensive, the rental market here differs radically from that in the US. For a start, most apartments are rented furnished, beginning a high stakes and very aggressive bargaining game between the landlady/lord and potential renter. For instance, upon visiting an apartment, a renter might demand, "I want a vacuum cleaner, desk and washing machine before I will rent it!" The landlord will retort back, "No, you can't have the desk, but I'll give you the washing machine!" and so forth. The stake are higher, of course, for more expensive apartments and I've heard reports of tenants demanding juice machines, DVD players and so on or else they will move out. Likewise, the moment where cash is handed over is a key one: Friends warned me that I must write down the serial numbers of the bills I use to pay rent (rent is paid in US dollars here) because scheming landladies have been known to claim that the bills given to them were fakes.
Unlike the US where year contracts are common, most apartments here are rented by the month. (Renting apartments by the day or even by the hour (!) is also common.) The moment, however, when you finally move into an apartment, however, is not one to relax! It begins a process of speculation on the part of both landlady and renter alike: Just as you can move out after a month, so the landlady can evict you after a month. I've heard plenty of stories of landladies evicting their tenants after a month or two because they found another tenant willing to pay twice as much. Kazakh friends tell me that there are laws against this in wintertime, especially for families with children, but the housing market here is, to put it mildly, wild.