What is a tenant and how does it work in Copenhagen?
In some countries, it’s forbidden, but in Copenhagen, it’s very common to sublet your apartment.
It is becoming a real business opportunity.
Basically, for every apartment there is a main tenant who is responsible for managing the rental of the property and has privileged contact with the landlord.
It comes with duties and responsibilities, but it also comes with many interesting perks.
Most of the time, main tenants rent large apartments with multiple rooms that they can rent at their discretion while occupying one of the rooms themselves.
Fixing your prices
As the main tenant, you are free to set any price for renting out rooms.
This means you can potentially eliminate your own rent costs if you have enough flatmates, as you can distribute/dilute your portion of the rent into their payments.
However, you cannot make a profit as the main tenant, though it is perfectly legal to reduce your own rent to zero.
Flatmates transfer money to the main tenant, who then pays the landlord. It’s during this step that the main tenant can manage the cost distribution.
Note: This may not always be the case - while it’s an opportunity for tenants to reduce their living costs, some may choose not to do so depending on their personal values.
Big entry price
While this sounds like a great opportunity to save on rent, the initial costs can be quite high.
Since you are renting a big apartment with few rooms, the bigger is the apartment the bigger the deposit is, but also the bigger the entry cost is.
You need to calcultate it yourself, as every situation is unique, but giving a lot of liquidity one shot can sometimes not be the ideal solution.
For instance, you can use that money to invest elsewhere in the stock market and have a better return.
It also heavily depends on how long you will want to stay in the apartment, the more you plan to stay, the more is it worth to pay at the beginning.
But life is tricky and the future is hard to predict.
You can eject flatmates within 2 weeks
One of the other rules that are special in Denmark, is that the main tenant has the right to ask for the flatmate to leave the apartment within 2 weeks.
If the flatmates refuses, he can just start a procedures to eject him.
Thus, if one day you want to live with friends, you can easily ask your flatmates to leave and they will have no others choices than to leave.