New law limiting six persons per dwelling will ‘reduce over crowdedness’

Property rental agencies believe that a new law proposed by the government will help reduce over-crowdedness in apartments, a subject of so much controversy in the past months.

Landlords will only be able to register a maximum of six tenants in one dwelling, this was announced by Social Housing

Minister Roderick Galdes, as part of a new reform to rent laws.

Contacted by The Malta Independent on Sunday, letting agencies agreed that these legal amendments should bring about better control on the number of people allowed inside a given accommodation.

Galdes said that this new law will serve to strengthen the rental sector, noting that the majority of landlords are in conformity with the law and were catalysts for the amendments that he was presenting.

However, there is still a small band of landlords who abuse, and this will be addressed through this law, he said.

Apart from acknowledging that this will reduce over crowdedness in rental properties Dhalia CEO Alan Grima said that in turn this will increase the demand for such properties as “tenants seek compliant accommodations”.

“It should, therefore, bring more stability and professional standards to the rental market,” he added.

However, he also pointed out that “we feel that landlords, with larger properties, might need to rethink their rental strategies such as, for example targeting families rather than individual tenants”.

The Housing Authority, according to the proposed law, will be given the power to issue administrative fines of up to €2,329 where the correct practices, such as a failure to register a contract with the same authority, are not followed.

If the landlord fails to cooperate with the authority and not conform with the law in a short period of time, then they will face the Magistrates’ Court and may be fined up to €10,000.

On his part, Cara Rooms Malta director, Cecil McCarthy, noted that “if implemented correctly it should work, but unfortunately, I have not yet seen the fine print”. He said that “six is a large number (for three-bedroom apartments) and thus I don’t see it in any way affecting the market’s value”.

“It will only clamp down on the ones trying to overpack properties or rent beds by the hour. Again, one needs to review the legal notice and see what exactly it will say,” he said.

PN MP Alex Borg described the amendments as draconian in a Facebook post and said that “in light of the abuse and exploitation that was created by the rapid growth of the population, a problem that this government itself has created, has led it to take decisions out of panic, without reason, logic and planning”.

In comparison he said that in the hypothetical scenario, where a person ends up renting a one-bedroom apartment, there can be up to six persons, but “if the property is of four or five floors, the maximum number of occupants is also six people”.

The PN MP proposed that the limit of people per dwelling should be based on the size and type of the property rather than just setting the universal number of six.

He also warned that with such an amendment rent prices will go up.