Suppose you want to buy a property in a city where the buyout protection law applies. This property has been rented out. With many landlords, the question is: suppose the tenants move out, can you re-let this property?
The answer is as follows. Among other things, the purpose of the buyout protection law is to prevent additional housing from being taken from the existing housing stock by real estate investors. The rule is that a property must have been rented continuously for at least 6 months. Only then does the buyout protection law no longer apply. If the tenants leave, then you may continue to rent out the property forever and the buy-out protection law no longer applies. Please note that at all times the other applicable rules apply. So if you rent out an apartment, then renting out has to be permitted by the VvE and/or if you rent out somewhere where a Housing Permit is required, then that remains unchanged.
Please note: the regulation rule that the property must be rented for at least 6 months also applies at the time of the transfer of ownership. Suppose the tenants leave before the transfer of ownership has taken place, then you as a landlord are out of luck, because then the house will be delivered to you free of rent and then the buy-out protection law will apply again.
File Creation
Are you buying or selling a home in rental condition in an area where buyout protection applies? Then our urgent advice is that you keep a good file with which you can prove that the property has been rented out for at least 6 months at the time of the transfer of ownership. In this file, you can think of: a signed lease. Bank statements showing rents paid, communications with tenants, etc.
The reason for this is, that if the municipality later rings the bell and disputes whether the property had been rented for 6 months, you can sufficiently prove this.
Enforcement
Now the other question is, how big is the chance of being caught if your purchased property had not been rented for more than 6 months or if the tenants had just left at the time of the transfer of ownership? Let it be clear that we do not want to encourage you ignore the rules. But having said that, it seems to us and our legal counsel that it is a fairly impossible task for a municipality’s enforcement to properly monitor this 6 month rule of rental properties. Not every tenant registers with a municipality, and it is also very difficult to find out in the notarial and cadastral field from when exactly a property was rented out and until when it was rented out.