A Profit Rent Scheme

I sat last night and watched a state-run/public TV news piece on Plus-Minus.  The topic?  For several decades, Germany has kinda run a medical tourist operation.  As strange as it sounds....the German medical system is kindly regarded as one of the better systems in the world.

So, if you were rich and living in a country....outside of the EU....you might be looking around and grasping that there's fine private clinics in Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, or Hamburg.  These are run by professional German managers, and some of the better surgeons are doing the work.

Naturally, this means that you fly in.....find some residence to recuperate for two to four months....rather than spend the whole time in some cramped-up hospital room.

Well...as the Plus-Minus reporters have discovered....there's this racket which has developed.  You want a fine or decent two bedroom condo/apartment, in a nicer neighborhood, and well furnished?  You could be talking about three to five thousand Euro.  A typical German?  They might pay 1,000 to 1,500 Euro for normal rent.....but the renters have figured out that there's plenty of room to gouge the foreign visitors.

The city managers and authorities? They aren't exactly raising a fuss about this racket.

How many apartments fall into this rent practice?  Unknown.  No one collects statistics like this and most of the visitor-guests probably don't want to attract much attention.

So, you end up with some Saudi, or Kuwaiti.....spending possibly 12,000 Euro for three months.

I sat and watched this whole thing and came to the point of wondering about the number involved.  Could there be 500 apartments in the Wiesbaden area being rented out at this level?  Maybe.  There could be a couple million a month that just quietly moves around like this in one single community, and is an element of medical tourism.

You would think that the hotels would wake up and realize the impact of this, and open up a specialized hotel operation and take a chunk of the profit away....but no one seems to have figured out the angle to this yet.