With the housing law there has been a significant change in the rental market. But the law is made, the trap is made. It is true that now, when renting a habitual residence, it is the owner who must pay the real estate agency its fees for the management and formalization of the contract, and not the tenant.
But a legal loophole in the housing law allows the real estate commission to be passed on to the tenant in cases where the rental is not considered for habitual residence.
Temporary rentals – contracts between 32 days and 11 months – are considered rentals for use other than housing, according to the law. For this reason, the conditions of the contract arise, first, from an agreement between the parties, and then from the Urban Leases Law and the Civil Code.
The temporary nature must be justified - for example, for students or for a temporary job - but in practice many owners or real estate agencies are deliberately forcing the temporary nature of their rentals to avoid the measures of the housing law and to impact the tenant on the tenant. Agency commission.
A step back for access to housing. The Government, aware of the flight of apartments to temporary rentals, has confirmed that it intends to regulate them as well. But this could take months, or even years, to become a reality.
The rental of rooms, like the temporary one, cannot be considered habitual residence, although in practice it may constitute the residence of the tenants of each of the rooms.
It should be remembered that renting that does not constitute the tenant's habitual residence is not advisable at a tax level, since the owner does not have access to any type of bonuses in the payment of personal income tax.
The housing law, of course, applies to those rentals that are for residential use. Everything else is left out of the text.
We could talk about commercial premises, offices or offices, industrial warehouses, storage rooms or warehouses, market stalls, parking spaces, among many other examples.
There is a type of luxury housing that is not regulated by the Urban Leasing Law either. They are “luxury homes”, that is, those that have a surface area greater than 300 m² or are rented for rents of 5.5 times the interprofessional minimum wage. In 2024, there would be a rent of 7,276.5 euros per month.
The law forces the owner to pay, literally, "the costs of formalizing the contract", so those who take it literally have decided to offer other "services to the tenant" to pass on other fees to them.
These fees should not be mandatory, and in any case must be requested or accepted voluntarily by the tenant.
