Flemish Tenants Sublet Rented Flats on Airbnb, Landlords Blindsided
Landlords in Flanders are finding out, sometimes months after the fact, that tenants have been listing their rented flats on Airbnb without ever asking permission. The tenant keeps paying the agreed monthly rent, quietly turns the flat into a short-term rental on the side, and pockets the difference between what they owe the owner and what a nightly guest pays.
The pattern surfaces the same way each time. A landlord gets a call from a neighbour about strangers coming and going with suitcases, or spots the flat's own furniture in an Airbnb listing photo. By then the tenant has often collected several months of guest income, and the property shows wear that goes well beyond normal residential use: extra keys cut, locks changed, sofa beds and extra furniture brought in to sleep more guests than the lease ever allowed.
How the arrangement gets past the landlord
Flemish tenancy law is clear on paper: a tenant needs the owner's written consent before subletting all or part of a rented home, and short-term platform listings count as subletting. In practice, nothing in the sign-up flow on Airbnb checks whether the person listing a property is the owner or has a lease that permits it. The platform verifies identity, not tenancy status, which leaves the landlord as the only party with an incentive to check the listing exists at all.
Why owners have limited recourse once it's discovered
Ending the lease early is rarely quick. Belgian landlords generally have to go through a justice of the peace to terminate a residential lease for breach of contract, and that process can run for weeks while the tenant keeps hosting. Insurance is another gap: most landlord policies are written around long-term residential occupancy, not paying guests cycling through every few nights, so damage claims tied to short-term letting can be contested or reduced. Recovering the actual Airbnb income the tenant collected is harder still, since the landlord was never a party to those bookings and has no visibility into what was charged.
What owners can do before signing a lease
Property owners renting out flats long-term are starting to write explicit subletting bans into the lease itself, rather than relying on the general rule, and some are asking letting agents to run periodic checks of major short-term platforms for their own address. None of that is foolproof against a tenant determined to hide it. Owners who decide the better answer is to let the property short-term themselves, rather than leave that income on the table for a tenant to take, increasingly set up direct booking sites through tools such as Lodgify's vacation rental website builder so they keep control of who lists the property and on what terms, instead of discovering it after the fact on someone else's account.
None of this changes the underlying enforcement problem. Airbnb has no obligation, and currently no mechanism, to confirm that a host holds the legal right to sublet before a listing goes live. Until that changes, the burden of catching an unauthorised listing sits with the landlord, and by the time most of them notice, the tenant has already been paid.
