Ceviche said:
You need not be so concerned about renting agencies in BA..as far as I am concerned all these short term rental agencies are blood sucking desperate guys to loot gringos...
I disagree. There is a lot of bad talk on this board about the temporary rental agencies. People seem to think that they should be able to rent a furnished apartment for a few months at the same rate as a local who rents for 2 years, but as a landlord who rented out apartments to foreigners, you have to think about a few issues...
1. They furnish the apartment. Oftentimes the investment in furniture, plasma TV, etc might take more than a year to recover.
2. They have no legal protection. When you rent out to someone without a guarantee you have to risk the fact that they might just stay in the apartment and refuse to leave.
3. Marketing. The temporary rental agencies pay a ton of marketing on the web, etc to find the foreigners. They charge the owners 15-25% per month for the rental. This extra cost gets passed on to the customer. When you rent with a typical agency the real estate commission is much much lower and usually paid by the renter.
4. Temporary rentals have all services included. You need to charge enough to cover the expensas, taxes, cable, internet, etc. This all adds up. In a normal rental these are all paid by the renter.
5. You need to charge more to make up for the increased vacancy. Normal apartments that are on 2 year contracts are almost never empty. A temporary rental could be empty 30-40% of the time. So automatically you need to charge 30% more just to break even with a normal rental.
Furnishings + extra risk + marketing costs + services & taxes + vacancy = 200-300% more for a temporary rental than a normal apartment on a two year contract.
Landlords are not bloodsuckers, they are just trying to make a decent return on their investment. I eventually got out of this business because the return wasn't high enough for me.
