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This is what you need to know about the regulationAre tenants allowed to dry their laundry on the balcony?
As long as the laundry does not cause a disruption to others when it is being dried, tenants and apartment owners cannot be prohibited from doing so.
picture alliance / picture alliance/dpa / Markus Scholz
Can laundry dry on the balcony? Some rental agreements and house rules actually stipulate restrictions here. But are they also legally tenable?
The sun is shining and the laundry is finished washing? Then let's take it to the balcony or terrace. But some tenants and apartment owners are unsure: Wasn't there a clause in the rental agreement or house rules that prohibited exactly that? But what applies legally? Can landlords and homeowners' associations (WEG) actually issue such restrictive bans?
No, says lawyer Dennis Rehfeld, member of the executive committee of the Tenancy Law and Real Estate Working Group in the German Lawyers' Association. At least not across the board. “It always depends on what you mean by drying clothes,” says the lawyer. “There is a frame where you can dry your laundry.” Fundamental exclusions in the rental agreement or the house rules are therefore inadmissible.
As long as the laundry does not cause any harm to others when it is being dried, tenants and apartment owners cannot be prohibited from drying their laundry outside. So if there is a clothes horse with commercially available laundry on the balcony that does not protrude over the parapet and therefore does not change the visual appearance of the house, there is no objection to this. At the same time, it is also important that the textiles do not cause any odor nuisance to neighbors and that they do not damage the house when drying.
According to Dennis Rehfeld, drying laundry is not a problem even on the terrace, which often does not have a parapet or privacy screen like a balcony. Things can only become difficult if, for example, prints on the textiles send out political messages. Then drying laundry could very well be prohibited in individual cases. What matters here too is what neighbors, landlords and the like see of the laundry.
What tenants and owners should always avoid: affecting third parties. For example, if the laundry is not hung on a drying rack but simply over the parapet, this can impermissibly affect the appearance of the house. On the other hand, the moisture from washed bed linen can penetrate into the masonry and damage it. According to Dennis Rehfeld, this is always forbidden, “regardless of whether such an exclusion exists in the rental agreement or in the house rules.”
Sources used: awi/dpa
