Josef Fritzl, 73, a retired engineer, has hired a second lawyer to deal with his property and rent out the flats in his three-storey home in the town of Amstetten dubbed a "House of Horrors".

Fritzl lived in a top floor apartment with his wife Rosemarie, 69, and three of the children he fathered with his daughter Elisabeth, 42, over 24 years, while the other three were forced to live with their mother in a dank concrete dungeon in the cellar, never seeing the light of day until the case was revealed this April.

One of the children died after birth and Fritzl burned the body in a furnace.

The other flats in the house were rented out until Fritzl's arrest, when horrified tenants terminated their contracts and moved out.

"We could not endure living so close to the torture cellar and being reminded every day of it. That is why we wanted nothing but to get out of there and start a new life with our children somewhere else," a former tenant was quoted as saying.

There apparently is no legal obstacle for Fritzl to rent out the upstairs flats. But the cellar is sealed by police as a crime scene and will remain so until the end of the trial, the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reported.