Landlords often charge students excessive service fees

A landlord isn’t allowed to make a profit on costs for cleaning, garden maintenance or a caretaker. But they regularly do NOSop3 reports.

The broadcaster went through all 5595 verdicts on service charges by the rental assessment committee in the past five years. In 3812 of the cases (68 percent), the committee had found in favour of the tenants. Some companies have been told dozens of times by the committee that they are charging excessive service fees.

XIOR Student Housing even lost more than four hundred cases. The company said to NOSop3 that this was caused by a “mistake”. In every case, the company must motivate the actual service charges with invoices, but it reportedly doesn’t always manage to do so fast enough for the rental assessment committee. XIOR rents out thousands of student rooms in fifteen Dutch cities.

In the lost cases, the annual service fees charged by the landlords were too high by an average of 743 euros, NOSop3 calculates based on the verdicts.