Forty six percent of tenants in the Czech Republic have a lease agreement for less than two years. Almost the same group of people, 45 percent, have a contract for an indefinite period. Short-term leases mainly concern young people with lower incomes who live in big cities. Tenants over 45 are particularly likely to have longer contracts and open-ended contracts. Tenants over 35 years of age, with higher levels of education, living in family homes are generally more satisfied with their housing. This is according to a survey of 1,400 respondents conducted by the Ministry of Regional Development (MMR) last June.
Almost a fifth of respondents said they had a lease agreement for less than one year. This was roughly 400,000 people. More than 26 percent of respondents have a contract of one to two years. 71 per cent of landlords indicated two years or less as their preferred contract length.
“Both sides of the tenancy relationship consistently complain of insecurity in the survey. For tenants, it is caused by recurring short-term contracts, while among landlords there is widespread concern about non-payers and disproportionate length of eviction. If rental housing is to become a long-term, stable alternative, we need to start talking openly about how to alleviate these concerns,” said Deputy Prime Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Regional Development Ivan Bartoš (Pirates).
According to the authors of the survey, the significantly higher share of longer-term or indefinite-term contracts among people over 45 is mainly due to historical development. Before 1989, contracts for an indefinite period of time prevailed, and only then did landlords start to prefer short-term contracts. According to Bartos, the recurring one-year contracts among younger people may also be their own choice. “For example, they don’t want to be tied to a certain place, they plan to travel, study abroad. But for others, it can be a long-term source of dissatisfaction,” he said.
About five per cent of respondents said they had defaulted on their rent in the past year; the vast majority have paid off or are paying off the debt. In addition, 96 percent of respondents said they had never received a lease notice or an officially ordered eviction from their apartment. One percent of respondents had experienced eviction for non-payment of rent.
Smaller landlords with fewer than ten apartments most often reported rent payments were more than two weeks late, but these debts were eventually paid in full and in one lump sum. Over the course of a year, the likelihood of this occurring is about seven percent per apartment, the data show. In three per cent of cases, tenants paid their debt in instalments. The fear of losing one’s home is mainly related to age and net household income. In particular, tenants over 50 years of age have a lower fear of losing their housing.
According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 1.8 million people in the Czech Republic live in rented housing. Half of them are people living in families with children. There are approximately 400,000 children under the age of 18 living in rented housing, and 240,000 seniors aged 65 and over.
