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Idealis to charge registration fee

From January 2019, student accommodation provider Idealis will be offering rooms via ROOM.nl rather than its own website. Registering with Idealis was free but it will now be charging a one-off fee of about 35 euros. The advantage is that you can build up more registration time and take it with you.
Luuk Zegers

© Roelof Kleis

New rules are being introduced along with the new system, says Hellen Albers from Idealis. ‘You can register with ROOM.nl from the age of 16 so you start accumulating waiting time straight away. In the current system, future students can only register from 1 January of the year in which they start their degree.’ This is handy for people who don’t yet know where they will be studying: ROOM.nl also has rooms in Amsterdam, Leiden and Deventer, and there are plans to add Utrecht, Zwolle and Tilburg to the list. ‘So it’s a national platform and you also accumulate waiting time in all those other cities. That offers possibilities if you decide to do your Master’s in a different city, for example,’ says Albers. Idealis’s current system is provided by NCCW, a company that produces IT solutions for housing corporations. ‘We are the last people to still be using this system, which means it is no longer viable for NCCW. So we had to look for an alternative. ROOM.nl had just come on the market and we thought: if we join in, we won’t have to reinvent the wheel,’ says Albers. Albers offers reassurance that little will change for the current Idealis clients. ‘No one who is already registered with us or renting will pay for the transition. They will also be able to take their registration period with them. Incidentally, you go back to the bottom of the list when you get a room in our current system, whereas ROOM.nl keeps your initial registration date. That will make moving again easier.

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