A serviced villa is not a hotel with a garden, and it is not a normal long let with a cleaner attached. The difference sits in three places: the contract, the staff, and who carries the risk when the pool pump dies on a Sunday in August.
On this coast the word serviced gets used for three different things. The first is a villa with a management company on call: you rent normally, and someone answers the phone when the boiler quits. The second is a staffed house with cleaning several times a week, linen, gardener and pool contract included. The third is full concierge: chef, driver, nanny, someone to book the restaurant. The price gap between the first and the third is not ten percent. It is a different budget.
Ask which one is actually on the table before you fall for the pictures. A gardener and a pool contract are not staff. A housekeeper twice a week is not a live-in couple. Brochures blur this on purpose, and the blur survives right up to the signature if nobody asks.
Direct employment in Spain has a floor, and it is higher than most tenants expect. Cleaning runs 12 to 18 euros an hour gross. Twenty hours a week lands around 950 to 1,250 euros a month once contributions are paid. A live-in housekeeper is 1,400 to 2,000 plus room and board. A gardener is 150 to 350 a month for a normal villa plot, or 25 to 40 an hour. Pool service is 80 to 150 a month, more if the pool is large or visited twice a week.
Add it up for a four or five bedroom house and you are at 800 to 1,200 euros a month before anyone cooks anything. That is the honest baseline. If the agency employs the staff, you pay a margin on top and you avoid the Social Security paperwork. That is the trade, and it is a fair one, as long as the hours and the holiday cover are written down.
If the villa is your habitual home, it should be an arrendamiento de vivienda. That means five years, seven if the landlord is a company, annual updates by the IRAV index, one month of fianza, and a tenant who cannot simply be shown the door. A serviced stay of two or three months is usually temporada or uso distinto, outside those protections, with a free price and a shorter notice period.
Services belong in an annex with prices, hours, response times and a cancellation rule. If the service is mandatory and bundled into the rent, it is part of the rent, which matters if you ever have to argue about it. The question to ask is boring and useful: what happens when the pool pump fails on a Sunday?
Tax treatment is worth one email. Residential rent is normally exempt from VAT. Separately invoiced services are not, so a company paying the bill wants the invoice split correctly. Get that in writing before the first payment, not after.
An unfurnished long let with four or five bedrooms and a pool in Llavaneres, Teia or Cabrils typically asks 4,000 to 7,000 euros a month. Front line pushes 8,000 to 12,000. A serviced version of the same house adds staff, linen, consumables, management and the right to leave after six months. If the quote is forty percent higher, most of that is flexibility, not cleaning.
The real value is time. No utility accounts in your name, no pool contract to chase, no gardener to find in July, no inventory argument at the end. For a family landing between houses, that is worth paying for. For someone staying three years, it is usually cheaper to rent normally and hire a cleaner.
Families on a six to twelve month relocation, people between houses, owners whose own villa is being renovated, and companies housing an executive. If you are staying three years and want your own furniture, take a normal lease and buy the services separately. You keep the five-year protection and you are not paying for a concierge you will never call.
One last check: ask for the last three tenants service schedules, not testimonials. A schedule tells you whether weekly garden means every Tuesday or twice in the season.
Tell us the dates, the number of people and which services you actually want. We will tell you what is realistic at your budget, including the staff costs nobody puts in the listing.
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