The car park in the middle of the just-completed complex was full of cars over Easter weekend. The prospective residents had been given their keys on 1 April and parents made use of the long weekend to help their offspring move their belongings from their old rooms to their new home. The communal areas were delivered in finished state by landlord Idealis. So students could move in right away once the necessary tables, chairs, sofas, fridges and televisions had been installed in the living room and kitchen. The bedroom walls still needed painting and ‘Not everyone realized that,’ said Dayo Jansen. ‘So one of my housemates didn’t move yet in last weekend. He had to paint first. But the others have all moved in.’ He is sharing the house with four others.
Group tenancy
Students had to sign up for a fiveperson unit as a group. ‘We are living together now, which is fun’, says Sarah, who lives a few houses away. Of course she was already sharing a unit with others at the Dijkgraaf, but now she is sharing this house with four friends. The same goes for all the houses on the Bellostraat. In fact one of Sarah’s housemates was on the her corridor at the Dijkgraaf. And now Sarah and Nina are still on the same corridor – on the top floor of their new house.
Next door is a group of students who had rooms in Ede till now. ‘There we had a couple of super-Christian housemates from the Christian college of higher education in Ede. Now it’s just us, which is nice.’ So how are they going to decorate the house? ‘We still want to paint this wall but we don’t know how yet,’ says Chenny. ‘Oh, we must do that before we hang up the TV on Thursday,’ adds Heleen. She may be around at the moment but she is still living at her landlady’s. Her new room isn’t furnished yet and anyway, she is still paying rent there.
The Bellostraat was completed one month ahead of schedule. So Idealis decided students could move in already, but would only start paying rent from 1 May. That way they are not saddled with two rents to pay. Dayo: ‘I gave notice as soon as I heard we could move in here. I only paid rent for my old room for the first week of April and am living rentfree for the rest of the month. A nice windfall.’ They like the new house. The only thing it lacks is hot water in the shower. ‘That kind of thing happens in a new house,’ says Dayo. He has reported it to Idealis and expects it will soon be solved. Besides the 80 students sharing houses, there are 69 single occupant units at the Bellostraat. It seemed as though not all of these were occupied yet when Resource visited on 7 April.
No more waiting list at Idealis
Idealis will have a room for all the students on its waiting list by 1 May. There is little response to rooms becoming available at the moment, says spokesperson Corina van Dijk. So it is easy for students who are actively looking to find a room. Last year too, the housing provider succeeded in housing everyone by 1 May. There are now, in fact, about 100 empty rooms in Idealis complexes, says Van Dijk. These were reserved for foreign students but remained unoccupied. Idealis reserves 1200 rooms for international students at Wageningen UR. There are no plans for renting them temporarily to Dutch students, as happened in October 2014.