As you learned from our previous blogs, the rent on your lease is not always correct. You probably don’t think it’s okay to pay too many hard earned dollars in rent every month, so now the question is: what is the maximum rent?
There are two calculations:
1. For an independent living space: use if your home is independent from other homes. This means that your home has its own entrance door and its own kitchen, toilet and shower.
2. For a non-self-contained dwelling: use if your home does depend on other homes. This is often the case if you have a room (which is then your private living space) and live with roommates with whom you do not form a single family. This calculation is easier to do and will result in a lower maximum rent, but is not possible if your landlord has cleverly drafted the contract and treats you together as one tenant. The validity of such a set-up is open to dispute, we will not go into this further during this blog as it is a subject in itself, but when in doubt, recommend sending the contract in and having it tested before you choose one of the two calculations and make a wrong request.
Maximum rent calculation free sector is always about the first calculation for the independent living space. So in this blog we are going to zoom all the way in on the calculation for independent living and come back to the second calculation during a later blog “Am I paying too much rent for my room?”.
Calculating the maximum rental price for free sector – self-contained accommodations
When you think of a calculation, you think of numbers, and it is true that your maximum rent is ultimately the result of a long sum of numbers assigned for the various properties. Several useful systems have been developed to perform this sum; that of Rental Price Help already performs part of it based on the information about your property from public records, and the Rent Commission has an accurate tool at Rental Price Check Independent Living | Rent Commission.
So performing the sum will be fine, the hardest part is determining the values you use in this sum in such a way that you can also defend them properly. The valuation system is the result of years of discussions, making it more complex than you might expect. Every detail counts, so you can pay dozens of euros less each month if you can argue properly which square meters, for example, do not count because your home has sloping roofs, or which square meters of wall tiles in your kitchen and bathroom can be counted. There are too many definitions and stipulations that matter to share in a blog. These are elaborated in the ‘Decree on rental prices for housing‘ and are also explained in the Rent Commission’s 63-page policy book. We advise you to get help; you’ll often earn our fee back twice over with the extra savings you get, and save all the time and effort of delving into the material and discussing it with your landlord.
If you would still like to work on this yourself, we wish you good luck and would like to give two more tips to prepare you for the following common discussion points:
- Some values are time-bound. It then matters on which article of law you can lower. For example, the WOZ value is an important indicator and it changes annually. If you can reduce on the initial price, it is important to take the WOZ value of the time of entering into the contract, while the current WOZ value applies when you can reduce based on points.
- Some values have an expiration date. For example, energy performance is an important indicator for which different forms of measurement have been developed over time as a result of the innovations we are experiencing in this area. For example, “the energy label” is the best known reflection of energy performance, which is based on 10 factors and is publicly available for every home. There has been a decision allowing landlords to have an Energy Index determined, which is a lot more detailed and thus used as a starting point over the energy label (often leading to a different conclusion of the energy performance). Both forms are valid for up to 10 years, so be sure to check what measurements were taken for your home and also when they were taken.
