Belgian Tenants Caught Subletting Landlords' Flats on Airbnb
Landlords in Flanders are finding out, often months after the fact, that tenants renting their properties on standard long-term leases have quietly relisted those same units on Airbnb and pocketed the nightly income themselves. The properties in question were let under ordinary residential contracts, not short-term rental agreements, and in each case the landlord had no idea guests were cycling through their flat until neighbours complained or the tenant simply vanished with rent unpaid.
The pattern is straightforward and depressingly low-tech. A tenant signs a residential lease, moves in, then creates an Airbnb listing for the same address using photos of the flat and a fabricated story about being the owner or an authorised manager. Guests book, pay the tenant directly through the platform, and the landlord is left covering wear, complaints and sometimes unpaid rent while a stranger's short-term booking income flows to someone with no right to generate it in the first place.
Why Airbnb's checks did not catch it
Airbnb's identity verification confirms who a host is, not whether that person is entitled to let the specific address they've listed. A tenant with a real ID and a working payment account clears the platform's onboarding without difficulty. Nothing in that process cross-checks land registry data, tenancy agreements or a landlord's consent, which means the fraud only surfaces when someone outside the transaction - a neighbour, a building manager, a landlord doing a routine inspection - notices unfamiliar faces coming and going.
What landlords and managers should tighten now
Standard residential leases in Belgium, as in most jurisdictions, already restrict subletting without written consent, but that clause is only useful if landlords enforce it actively rather than assuming it's self-policing. Property managers handling multiple units are being advised to write explicit short-term-let bans into contracts, register leases with a fixed occupant count, and check periodically whether an address is live on Airbnb or Booking.com under someone else's name - a five-minute search that costs nothing and would have flagged every case reported so far.
For landlords who do want to let a property short-term legitimately, the safer route is doing it themselves rather than leaving the door open for a tenant to do it without consent. Managing that directly, through a licensed booking setup and a direct booking website rather than an informal arrangement, at least keeps the income, the guest vetting and the paper trail under the owner's control.
Belgian regional rules on short-term letting vary, and Flanders has its own registration requirements for anyone offering tourist accommodation, obligations the subletting tenants in these cases were also ignoring. That leaves landlords facing not just lost income and property damage but potential exposure if local authorities come asking who was actually operating an unregistered short-term let at their address. None of this required a sophisticated scam. It required a landlord who wasn't watching, and a platform that had no reason to ask the one question that mattered: does this tenant actually own the place they're listing.
