Lucrative business: homes turned into hotels

With tourist-season around the corner, renting out your home can be very lucrative.

There is probably no easier way to make a few hundred euros than renting your house. All you need is a little entrepreneurship, a house or apartment in a desirable location, and a relaxed attitude towards strangers snooping around your kitchen cabinets and using your TV set.

Enter ‘apartment rental Amsterdam’ (or any other city’s name) into an online search engine and dozens of websites advertising rental mediators will pop up. They include dubious firms flaunting pictures of dodgy rooms, to professional agents offering beautiful designer apartments. Prices on the websites vary from 60 to 250 euros a night. And they all encourage homeowners to sign up and rent out their apartments in exchange for a 15 percent commission.

Some work involved

For ten years now, Christoph Blans has been renting out private apartments, homes and house boats for short stays in Amsterdam. Working through City Mundo, he takes care of presentation, reservation, payments and, if desired, cleaning.

He offers accommodations for a minimum of three and a maximum of 21 nights. Shorter stays are not cost-effective for the impromptu landlord, Blans said. Renting out entails a lot of work: valuables need to be stored, the place needs to be cleaned, linens washed, keys handed over, tenants instructed, and so on.

He has a few criteria before he puts a home on his website, he said. “First we drop by to see if a space is suitable to be rented out. Then we settle on a price together and take pictures. Location is key here. “But it has to be legal as well. You can’t just rent out anything in Amsterdam.”

Illegal hotel? 16,000 euro fine

Rules are strict, and the fines for running an illegal hotel are high in Amsterdam. According to a spokesperson for the city, renting your place out occasionally for a few days poses no problem, but once the practice becomes more structural, the city’s short stay policy kicks in, meaning the owner needs a permit. Renting out apartments regularly for periods shorter than a week is not allowed under any circumstances: this would deem one’s house an illegal hotel, and could entail a fine as high as 16,000 euros.

Most rental contracts bar the practice of subletting. In theory, the bank can also object to a homeowner with a mortgage renting his or her place out, especially if tenants remain for longer periods of time, reducing the value of the real estate. In practice, banks don’t mind the occasional tourist.

Those with a large house could consider renting out a room and registering with the city as a Bed & Breakfast. The added advantage here is it allows the owner to stay home and keep an eye on things.

Do-it-yourself

But, said Hugo Lingeman, there are downsides too. “It can take quite a toll, all those people in your house and on the stairs.” Lingeman began renting out rooms 15 years ago and currently has an entire guest floor with its own entrance. “If I have time, sometimes I’ll share a glass of wine with my guests, but I don’t have to. You don’t have that freedom when the guests are staying in your own home,” Lingeman said.

Lingeman also hosts a website called amsterdapartmentrental.com that allows home owners to advertise their property for an annual fee of 300 euros. He runs similar sites for Rotterdam and The Hague, but he does not mediate. Interested parties can contact their prospective landlords directly and take care of their own business. This can be cheaper than paying commission to an in-between, depending on how often people are looking to rent out their place. Even after deducting commission and taxes, the practice remains quite lucrative. A tourist staying paying 120 euros a night can go a long way to paying for the owner’s ski-trip.