The 'Tijdelijke Verhuur' Listings That Can Get You Evicted With One Month's Notice

I've had multiple House Hunter users message me some version of the same thing: they signed a 'tijdelijke huur' contract in Rotterdam or Utrecht, moved their whole life into the place, and then got a letter three months later saying they had to be out. Not because they broke any rule. Because the landlord had a Leegstandwet permit, and the permit period was ending.

Most renters assume 'temporary contract' means something like a fixed one-year lease that just doesn't renew automatically. That's not what this is. A Leegstandwet rental is a completely different legal category, built for properties that are vacant and waiting to be sold, demolished, or majorly renovated. The government lets landlords rent these out under weakened rules specifically so the homes don't sit empty in the meantime.

The problem isn't that the arrangement exists. It's that the listings on Pararius, Kamernet, and various expat housing sites rarely spell out what you're actually signing. To an international renter scanning listings in English, 'tijdelijke verhuur' just reads as 'temporary rental' — a category that, since July 2024, barely exists anymore for normal contracts.

Since the Permanent Rental Contracts Act took effect on July 1, 2024, indefinite contracts became the default for nearly all residential rentals in the Netherlands. Landlords can no longer just hand you a one-year fixed contract and let it lapse. There are only a handful of narrow exceptions left — student housing, urgent renovation situations, and rentals under the Leegstandwet.

That last exception is the one that quietly survived the reform, and it's the one landlords increasingly lean on when they want flexibility without the obligations of a standard Dutch lease. The Leegstandwet was never designed as a workaround for the new law — it existed long before — but it's now one of the few legal doors still open for genuinely short, low-protection rentals. Landlords know this. Most tenants don't.

Under a normal Dutch rental contract, Book 7 of the Civil Code gives you real security: strict grounds for eviction, defined notice periods, and the right to escalate unfair treatment to the Huurcommissie. Under a Leegstandwet permit, a long list of those exact articles simply don't apply — the sections covering rent protection, security of tenure, and regulated eviction procedures are switched off by design.

What's left is thin. The tenant needs to give one month's notice to leave. The landlord needs to give three months. That sounds almost fair until you realize the contract also ends automatically the moment the permit expires — regardless of what either party wants. There's no conversion to an indefinite contract if the landlord messes up the paperwork, which is the safety net that exists in ordinary temporary contracts. The Leegstandwet has no such safety net at all.

And if the landlord sells the property before the permit even runs out? The permit itself can be revoked. You could be looking at three months' notice at best, in the middle of winter, with no obligation on anyone's part to explain why or offer you anywhere else to go.

Permits under the Leegstandwet are granted for a minimum of six months and a maximum of five years, by the municipality. Renewal is never guaranteed — when a permit lapses, so does your tenancy, automatically, with no legal requirement for the landlord to offer you a new agreement. If a landlord wants to use the Leegstandwet on the same property a second time, there has to be a five-year gap first, which tells you how the whole system is built around temporary use, not stable housing.

There's also a detail that surprises a lot of renters: a private owner can hold a Leegstandwet permit on up to two owner-occupied properties they're trying to sell, at the same time. That's a landlord actively marketing the flat for sale while you're living in it — and the moment a buyer signs, your tenancy is on borrowed time. In cities like Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Den Haag, where sale prices and demand are high, that clock can move fast.

For most Dutch rental disputes — a landlord raising rent unfairly, disputing a huurprijscheck, dragging out a deposit return — the Huurcommissie is the standard recourse. It's free, it's effective, and Dutch tenants use it constantly. Under a Leegstandwet contract, that door is mostly closed. Because the underlying Civil Code protections don't apply in the first place, there's very little legal ground for the Huurcommissie to intervene on when it comes to the eviction itself.

Your only real recourse is checking whether the landlord followed the minimal notice period correctly. That's it. There's no arguing 'this isn't fair' the way you could with a regular contract, because fairness was never built into this framework — flexibility for the landlord was the entire point.

The giveaway is rarely obvious in the listing photos or the rent price — a Leegstandwet property can look and feel exactly like any other apartment in Groningen or Eindhoven. What you need to check is the contract itself and the reason given for the temporary status. If the landlord mentions the property is 'awaiting sale,' 'scheduled for demolition,' or references a Leegstandwet vergunning anywhere in the paperwork, that's your signal.

Ask directly: is this a Leegstandwet permit rental? Ask to see the permit and its expiry date. A landlord renting in good faith under this law should be able to show you the document without hesitation — municipalities issue it, so it's not some private arrangement they can dodge questions about.

If you're an international renter without fluent Dutch, this is exactly the kind of clause that gets buried in legalese and skimmed past during a stressful, competitive viewing process. It's also why, at House Hunter, we flag listing language like this whenever it shows up in the scraped data — not because these rentals are illegal or always a bad deal, but because they're a fundamentally different product from the 'temporary contract' most renters think they're getting.