How to wire money

You have to wire the money in Euros. Talk to your bank, they can handle it, but it is expensive. Besides the transfer cost ($20 to $40), your bank will likely nick you on the currency conversion to the tune of 5%. At least that is my personal experience.
See if the landlord will do Paypal.

Look at transferwise.com - will be much cheaper (at 1%, min $3) than a US bank which invariably charge ridiculous fees for international electronic transfers.

I had to transfer money to myself from a US to a Europe-based account when I lived in Germany. If you have all the information of the recipient (including an account number in IBAN format), simply call your bank and say you need to make an international wire. They will ask for all required information and verify some stuff required by FATCO (which seems to treat all outgoing transactions from the US as a potential criminal act, thankyou very much US gov't!).

I wired money for an apartment once. Never again. It cost me $70 to do it. I opt to rent places that don't require wiring funds anymore.

I'll echo Andrea here that wiring money can be very expensive. I personally would never rent an accommodation that didn't provide another option of payment (preferably credit card).

As I post above, money transfer doesn't have to be very expensive any more, even for people living in the USA.

Be careful. Sending money by Wells Fargo, Moneygram, or similar is the equivalent of sending cash in the post - there is no way to claim the money back if the recipient rips you off and the general recommendation is only to do it with someone you know personally and trust. Requests for money transfers like this (as opposed to account-to-account bank transfer) are a major scam red flag.

Thanks all! I am looking into transferwise - looks like it will be pretty inexpensive. I will post more info if/when I do it.

Philip, can you clarify? What is the difference between calling my bank and sending money to their bank vs. using a service like western union? What I have is bank account and other info for them - all sorts of banking numbers and I would be moving money from my account to theirs. I have looked into the property and feel good about it, but if this is a specific red flag I'd like to know.

Just think of it this way, wiring money is the equivalent of handing them cash. If you trust them that is fine. But the bank, as an intermediary, will take the opportunity to make as much profit on the transaction as they think they can get away with. The bank is in the business of making money for its shareholders, but more importantly, for the bonuses for its managers.

Sorry, now I see you have bank details that's slightly better. What's a red flag is requests to use services like Western Union where the recipient simply provides a pass number and there's little record of their identity and no way of withdrawing the payment.

I have been in a similar situation. When I explained to the owner it would be very expensive for me they agreed to just take credit card information. Another time the person agreed to set up a Paypal account and told me I would be responsible for the fees involved which amounted to around $5. That worked out fine. I assume they do transactions like this in Europe cheaper than we can do it from the US, so for them it is an easy transaction, but not for us.

I rented an apartment in Germany two years ago, and I didn't have to give them a deposit in advance.

Check out transferwise.com (suggested by Marco, above). I checked their website, and I think if I ever needed to send money to Europe, that's the way I would do it.

Europe (Germany, at least) has something called, in German, an Überweisung. It's a card the payee sends you, with his bank information. You give it to your bank, and they transfer the money from your account to his - kind of a reverse check. Wish our banks would use these, especially to Europe.

Many European countries back in the days of paper used to organise their personal finance transactions around post-giros rather than cheques so it was natural to give people your bank account details and await payment through the central system. Paper giros transfer sent in by post have simply been replaced by online transfers.

In these systems it is the cheque that is rare and expensive to process.