AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – This summer, Maayan Shalhov, a young Zionist who started to look for a subtenant in the occupied territories merely a week before flying abroad, found he had no trouble finding one on time.
“I started to receive messages just an hour or two after I put my apartment photos on a subletting website,” said the 27-year-old resident of Tel Aviv, a city named the most expensive city to live in worldwide in 2021 by the research group The Economist Intelligence Unit.
With the money from subletting an apartment for two weeks, Shalov now could afford to fly to Italy for a living expense much cheaper than in Israel.
The niche market of house subletting is growing due to the hiking cost of living in the country, according to Amir Shefer, an operator of a social media group dedicated to short and long-term sublets in the city, which has 62,000 members.
As housing prices and the cost of living continued to climb, dozens of online groups connecting subleasers and potential subtenants are flourishing in the occupied territories, gaining tens of thousands of followers.
A large chunk of the clients sublet their apartments while planning a short getaway or relocation to countries less expensive than the occupied territories, said Shefer, also chief marketing officer at a Tel Aviv-based online subletting platform that has more than 120,000 users.
Subtenants range from the newly relocated, remote workers, and exchange students, to those whose homes are under renovation, according to Shefer.
Many Tel Avivans even took the legal risk of subletting their apartments without the consent of a landlord, banking on the earnings to make them better off during their move abroad, according to business insiders.
“We see a growing trend of people subletting their apartments as a way to save money and finance trips abroad,” Michal Cohen, a veteran in the business, told Xinhua.
Cohen said her organization gathered, mainly via Facebook groups, about 1.5 million people looking for various housing solutions.
“The problem we are facing in recent years is that everything is so expensive and the prices continue to go up,” she said, adding families with average and above salaries were struggling with rent.