Applying for permission to use an apartment as a vacation home

If you want to rent out your apartment as a vacation apartment or use it for tourist accommodation, you need a permit in municipalities with tight housing markets that have issued a vacation apartment statute. The permit requires an application to the municipality.

Municipalities with tight housing markets can determine by statute that living space may only be used as a vacation apartment with permission. The cities of Darmstadt, Frankfurt am Main, Maintal and Neu-Isenburg, for example, have vacation apartment bylaws in place.

The municipalities are responsible for approval. The relevant application forms can be downloaded from the websites. The application forms also contain information on the documents to be submitted with the application.

The requirements for submitting an application are regulated in the statutes of the respective municipality. The requirements for approval essentially depend on the scope and duration of the intended use. The city of Frankfurt a. M. states the following requirements for approval in its information sheet on the vacation apartment statutes:

• If an entire apartment is to be used permanently as a vacation apartment or for tourist accommodation and will therefore no longer be available to the housing market, approval is generally only possible against the creation of corresponding replacement living space or, in individual cases, against payment of a one-off compensation payment, which is to be used for the creation of new living space for a specific purpose. The amount of the compensation payment is determined by the average costs for the creation of publicly subsidized housing.
• If, on the other hand, only one room of an apartment or the entire apartment is temporarily let for the above-mentioned purposes, no compensation payment is required. However, the prerequisite for approval in this case is that the residential use is maintained by the main user in the sense of so-called home sharing and that he/she is resident there. The statutes define short-term use as a period of up to eight weeks per calendar year.

In exceptional cases, permission may be granted for temporary use for longer than eight weeks in return for a monthly compensation payment. In this case, the amount of the compensation payment is based on the local comparative rent for the corresponding living space.

Contradiction

Approval requires an application to the responsible municipality.

There is no deadline.

The processing time depends on the workload in the respective municipality.

The charging of administrative fees is governed by the respective municipal statutes on the charging of administrative costs.