We walked into an estate agent’s office in Calpe. We came out with ten months.
A window in Calpe, full of photographs of flats for sale. Sun-bleached, the prices underneath, a Tuesday in September. We were not buying anything.
We went in anyway.
We had just had a month in Nerja, booked the ordinary way, and we had liked it enough to want the thing a month doesn’t quite give you. So we drove up the coast and started walking into offices at random. That is not a plan. It is a willingness to be told no.
Nobody told us no. Estate agents in Spain don’t only sell. A great many of the flats on their books belong to people who bought them for later — for the retirement, for the investment, for the two weeks in August — and who would rather like somebody sensible in them for the other fifty.
They showed us a few. Then they showed us one by the beach, far too big for us and plainly too expensive, and we said so out loud, and it turned out that too expensive is an opening position rather than a fact.
We stayed ten months.
By November the woman in the shop on the corner had stopped selling us things and started keeping us talking. The market turned into people rather than produce. There were hills behind the town, and we ran out of Sundays before we ran out of walks.
The flat cost us around nine hundred euros a month. By the night, it had been a couple of hundred.
That gap has a number on it, and the number is twenty-eight.
We are staying in Europe this week, because this is where the rules are written down, the prices can be checked, and one of us has the receipts. Asia, where the monthly rate is practically the default, gets its own letter later on.
Book twenty-seven nights and you are a tourist. Book twenty-eight and you quietly become something else.
Airbnb calls twenty-eight nights or more a monthly stay. The listing changes price, the host’s monthly discount comes off, you pay month by month instead of all at once, and a long-term cancellation policy takes over from the usual one. It is not a promotion. It is a different product on the same page.
Underneath the platforms, the law is doing the same thing. In Spain, a let of up to about thirty days is a tourist rental: regional tourism law, a licence, a registration number, cleaning, and a price per night. From around thirty-two days up to eleven months it becomes an arrendamiento de temporada, a seasonal let under the tenancy act, with a contract instead of a booking and a price per month. Every European country draws that line somewhere, and it is always at roughly a month.
So the price doesn’t drop because somebody has decided to be kind. It drops because you have stopped buying a hotel. A nightly rate has to carry the cleaner, the linen, the licence, the tourist tax, the platform’s cut and the empty nights on either side. A monthly rate carries a flat.
Whatever month you are reading this in, some part of Europe is in its quiet season, and quiet season is the whole opportunity.
A kitchen, which changes everything about what a month costs. A washing machine, which changes everything about what you packed. A table you can put a laptop on and leave it there. Usually a lift, a balcony, a neighbour, and a bin day you will learn.
In furnished monthly lets the bills are often included, sometimes up to a cap. You get a door that isn’t opened by a cleaner on Thursdays, and a town that stops asking how long you are here for.
We can only tell you what ours cost, so here it is: around nine hundred euros a month for a large flat by the beach in Calpe, out of season, after we said out loud that the asking price was beyond us. The same flat by the night was priced at a couple of hundred.
Don’t take our number as your number — a Spanish coastal town out of season and a capital city in June are not the same market. Take the method instead. Put the nightly rate and the monthly rate for the same flat next to each other on the same screen, and work out what the twenty-eighth night is actually worth. Three things move that price: the season, the length you commit to, and whether you are talking to a platform or to a person.
Because you stop being a visitor somewhere around week three, and you can feel the day it happens.
A holiday is spent on the outside of a place, with a camera. A month puts you inside it. The woman in the shop knows what you buy. You have opinions about which bus lies about its timetable. You stop photographing the view from the balcony, because it will still be there tomorrow — and that, the not photographing, is the whole difference.
That is how we travel, at any rate. Every place we stay gets quietly assessed as somewhere we might live. A fortnight never answers it. A couple of months or more usually does.
If paying rent is the part you would rather remove altogether, house sitting and swapping homes with somebody get you the same month for nothing at all, and a long stay is simply the version where nobody has to trust you with their cat.
None of this is a reason not to go. It is the list we would want handed to us.
So open two of the sites above, pick a town you have always half meant to spend time in, and set the dates to a month. Look at the price. Then look at what the same flat costs for a week, and work out how much of your life you have been buying at the nightly rate.
If you book one of these, or try one, or talk yourself out of one — we would like to hear about it. Drop us a line.
— Birgitta & Anders
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