e) Rental agreement/Interruption of rental period/Extension of rental period

i) Rental agreement

About four to six weeks before you move in, and after you have paid your deposit, you will be contacted by Christine to sign the lease or - if you live further away - she will send it to you by mail and you will send it back signed by mail. The first month's rent you can still pay by bank transfer or cash, after that it will be done by SEPA direct debit mandate, which you will clarify with Christine when signing the lease. In individual cases you can of course discuss a different solution with Christine. The rental contract is valid for 4 semesters and can be terminated with a notice period of two months. If you are not sure whether you have to terminate the contract or not, for example because you do not know whether you will change your place of study or not, then discuss this with Christine in time, so that you can terminate the contract at short notice. If your rental period expires and you do not want to continue living here, you do not have to do anything.

ii) Interruption of rental period

If at some point during your time you do not want to live here for one or two semesters, because you are not in Bonn for a longer internship or going on Erasmus or something else, you can interrupt your lease for one or two semesters, which means that you move out of your room regularly on September 30 or March 31, as if you were leaving the DBH altogether, and then one or two semesters on October 1 or April you get the right to move back in here,[1] but most likely not in your old room, because in the meantime someone else has already moved in. However, Christine will give you a list of available rooms, from which you can tell Christine one or more wishes, and since you already know many people in the DBH, you can of course already think about in which shared apartment you would like to live with whom and ask if they also want that; but when the rooms are assigned, you will be lumped together with the first-year students and distributed to the rooms in a senior council meeting. For an interruption of the rental period you have to submit an informal request to the dormitory management at least two months before the semester, but these are actually always accepted. You can have a rent break for a maximum of two semesters during your time in residence, but it doesn't matter if they are taken in one piece or cut in half. However, if you are only away for a few months and then want to be back in Bonn, a sublease might be interesting for you.

iii) Extension of rental period

When you reach the end of your current lease, you can renew it several times, up to a maximum of 10 semesters.[2] To do this, you must submit an extension request to the Seniorat and the Heimleitung at least 3 months before the end of your lease, i.e. by December 31 and June 30, respectively, stating which semester you are currently in, how many of them you were active (and by what exactly), and by how many semesters you are extending (you can request two semesters twice and one semester twice); if there are any special circumstances that the Seniorat and Heimleitung have to take into account, be sure to write those in the request as well. The Seniorat then makes a recommendation to the Home Board, which makes a final decision. The decisive factor for the decision is how active you have been in the last semesters: Generally, you must have been active for at least half of the semesters since you moved in or had your last break in tenancy in order to be renewed, as evidenced by your sheets of activity. However, if you are slightly under this limit, the Home Board may still make a case-by-case decision, such as extending you for only one semester instead of the desired two, so that you can prove during that semester that you want to continue living in DBH. Shortly after the decision of the dormitory management, you will receive an attachment to your lease with your extended period of residence from Christine.