The number of tenants who do not pay their rent on time has increased more than threefold year-on-year for the Ostrava-based investment and property management company (SIAN). The reason is the economic crisis. The rental housing provider Heimstaden, on the other hand, has not seen an increase in receivables, but tenants have already seen a significant increase in their deposits last year.
SIAN manages nearly 700 flats mainly in Ostrava, but also in Opava, Frýdek-Místek and Havířov. “While in the first quarter of 2022, an average of 2.3 percent of tenants did not pay their rent on time, in the first quarter of 2023, 7.7 percent of all tenants did,” the company said. The main reason for this, it said, is the economic crisis.
“Just as the number of people struggling to pay their rent is rising, so is the number of people we are helping to get housing benefit. The positive thing is that we are managing to resolve this difficult situation with people and in the end somehow, with or without the help of benefits, people are paying their rent,” said Jakub Vysocký, director of SIAN.
After the third reminder, he said, the number of unpaid rents is significantly lower. “It shows that even the current financial hardship has a solution, it is just not possible to let it go too far. Both the tenant and the landlord must catch the situation in time and solve it immediately in mutual cooperation,” Vysocký said.
SIAN said that rent defaulters are increasing rapidly across the country. “According to statistics from the Ideal Tenant service, their numbers have risen by 11 per cent year-on-year – and that was in the last quarter of last year. In January, the increase was even higher – 34 percent,” the company said.
But Heimstätten spokeswoman Katerina Piechowicz said the company had not seen an increase in claims. Heimstaden Czech is the largest private provider of rental housing in the Czech Republic and owns nearly 43,000 apartments, mostly in the Moravian-Silesian region, where it mainly owns former mining apartments left by OKD.
“We prevented it with two measures that were crucial from our point of view: precisely in view of the difficult economic situation, we decided not to use the inflation clause to its full extent this year and we increased rents on long-term contracts by an average of 12.5 percent (inflation was 15.1 percent),” Piechowicz said.
The second step, she said, was a timely response to the increase in the price of heat. “Recent billing confirmed that the timely, albeit unpleasant, increase in deposits prevented arrears and we will be refunding 75 per cent of our clients’ deposits. The average amount of overpayments has also risen, while the average amount of underpayments has fallen,” said Piechowicz.
Source: CTK
