Spreading it equally

The rental business in Amsterdam is regulated and regulations, as a concept, are fine providing they are clear and equally applied. It can be tough suppressing the feeling that you’re being screwed by the agency enforcing the rules but it can be a tonic if you’re sure everyone else in your profession is also suffering the same oppression meted out with the same gusto.

A bit off the point but anyway… the Dutch tax authority is universally feared, collectively cursed, yet reluctantly accepted and even applauded when, now and again, they return some of the money they’ve stolen in a rebate that feels like a present. Their TV ad promoting electronic tax filing goes something like this: “We can’t make it nicer, but we can make it easier.” We grumble but we all know more or less where we are.

The rental business police – officially named “Dienst Wonen” and part of the local government apparatus – are often mentioned in conversation along with terms like professional, experienced, reasonable, approachable… or are they blinkered, prejudiced, dogmatic and vindictive? On reflection, the latter. Ideal Housing – the good guys – stand accused of doing things the wrong way. “What is the right way?” we cry. Dienst Wonen respond with “It’s not for us who are right to tell us to tell you who are wrong what is right but, rather, it’s for us who are right to insist that you – who are wrong – do it right in the future.” The civil servant delivers this twisted piece of logic with a smirk, sits back in his chair with his gut wedged against the table, and folds his arms across his paunch.

And just what is the Kafkaesque case we are being hauled over the coals about? I’ll tell you. An Israeli couple engages us to find them a rental property. We find one and draft contracts. They receive the draft contracts and use the owner’s contact information (provided on trust) to contact him directly and negotiate a lower price, sign documents without our input and avoid our agency fees. Two years later – that’s right, two years – they complain to rental police that they are paying more than the legally permitted rent. And they are! But they wouldn’t have done if they had completed the process with Ideal Housing that they’d started. Dienst Wonen have taken the position that

• We have brokered an illegal deal (we didn’t because the client did a runner before the deal was complete).
• We have seriously endangered our permit to act as a rental agency and they are considering whether to renew it or not.
• We have to repay the amount of rent paid by this Israeli couple back-dated to the start of the contract. It’s quite a sum.

Reasoning with these gentlemen has no use. We have engaged a lawyer.