Legal regulation of the contract for free use of the housing unit

The article is devoted to a complex analysis of the contract for a free use of a housing unit. In the article, it is mentioned that the existing civil legislation does not contain neither the notion of the contract for a free use of a housing unit, nor the details of the contract concluding, changing execution and stopping. The purpose of the article is to research the theoretical issues of the legal regulation of the contract for a free use of the housing unit. In the article, the analysis is performed of the positions of the legal scientists concerning the ways of the regulation of the relations of free use of a housing unit existed before the Russian Federation Housing Code was accepted. The author studies the contract for a free use of a housing unit as an independent contract type of the civil and legal obligations and refers it to the obligations to transfer the property for use. The necessity is pointed out to distinguish between the contracts for rent, loan and hire of the same object – a housing unit. The equivocation is mentioned in the correlation between the contract for a free use of a housing unit and such sub-concepts of the housing law as the settlement of the owner’s (renter’s) family members and temporary inhabitants into the apartment. The author proposes his personal definition of the contract for a free use of a housing unit, researches the features of this type of contract, point out the object and the subject of the contract, analyses the form, the term, the legal status of the parties and the cases of the contract termination. The author proposes the following definition for the contract in question: as per the contract of the free use of a housing unit (the loan contract for a housing unit) one party – the owner of the housing unit or a person truly authorized by him (the loaner) – obliges to allow the other party (the borrower) to use the housing unit for free, and the latter obliges to return the granted housing unit in the condition it was received with normal wear or in the condition provided by the contract. In the author’s opinion, it is necessary to amend Chapter 36 of the Russian Federation Civil Code with Article 701.1 «The Details of the Housing Units Loaning», the contents of which are described in the article by the author.