Your rented property is a very valuable investment.
Most property is now worth in excess of £100,000, which is a lot of money. If you are a buy to let landlord you will probably still be paying off the mortgage.
However if you let your property to tenants, you lose control over it. In a way, it is no longer yours. Your tenants can stay as long as they like, until such time as you get a Court Order for Possession and send the bailiffs round.
Even if they are not paying rent or are trashing the property. Or using it as a cannabis farm.
So it is CRUCIAL that the person you put in control of this very valuable asset is someone to be trusted. There are so many nightmare stories around (we will have an article on some of them later in this series).
References and credit checks
I read with amazement some time ago that a substantial proportion of landlords never check their tenants at all! (I have lost the reference but I can remember reading it very clearly).
This is madness! However good a judge of character you are – you cannot always spot the bad apples. Successful con men are very persuasive. That is why they are successful!
So please, please, make sure that at the very least you:
- Take references and follow them up
- Check their ID
- Double check all information provided to you (is that phone number their employer or their mate?), and
- Pay for credit referencing – for example with Tenant Verify or Tenant Referencing – which will pick up any CCJs and credit issues.
Check your letting agents
If you use letting agents – make sure that they are doing this too – properly.
When I did eviction work, I acted for many landlords who had found out to their horror that only minimal checks had been done by their agents.
Over the course of this month we will be running several posts on various aspects of checking and referencing tenants. Watch out for them!
Rent Rebel says
Ah, if only landlords were *obliged* to give tenants all that info and reassurance aswell. Bad apples on all fronts.
Ian says
I yet to have a tenant even ask me for a copy of my ID! I would be happy to provide ID, copy of mortgage statements etc if a tenant ever asked me.
It may even get the person to the front of my short list, just because they show they know something.
Ben Reeve Lewis says
In the current climate (an explosion of new letting agents and lack of regulation) I would certainly advise owners to check out any agents they are considering using.
as with credit referencing checks membership of ARLA, RLA, Safe Agent etc are no guarantee of financial stability or good service.
Find directors names (Companies house or Dellam.co.uk) and check names on http://www.companydirectorcheck.co.uk) Also Google the directors names to see if they crop up anywhere unpleasant.
The website “All agents” has some interesting reviews
Ben Reeve-Lewis says
Ian thats a really nice comment and I’m sure a lot of landlords feel the same way. Fair play mate.
Working at the arse-end of the business I see that a lot of tenants are prey to the worst landlords because they dont know basic rights.
The trouble is landlord/tenant law is phenomenally complicated. Even Tessa would struggle to keep the whole lot in her head but I have a theory……..
Most people can remember 5 things about running a car. What fuel it runs on, where to put it, who to sue in a rear ender etc. What if tenants could remember just 5 things that would put them in a position of power?
I’m on a mission with Renters Rights London to get just 5 things into the heads of tenants. 5 things they wont forget.
Lawyers probably wouldnt agree because they operate in the landscape of Brown v. Brash 1948 and section 12 of the Allotments Act 1950 but to get that level of knowledge to stick in people’s minds would require a law degree just to be a tenant, which becomes self defeating.
You dont need to be a mechanic to know a few basic facts about car ownership and driving. If it gets more complicated then you go to a mechanic, the same way that if your housing situation gets more involved than the ‘5 Things’, then you go for detailed advice.
Trouble is, as you indicate here, most tenants dont even know 5 essential things about renting.
The informed consumer will demand more from their landlord and things can only get better.
The rogues wont be able to pull the wool over tenants eyes.
Rent Rebel says
What 5 things wd they be Ben?
Good for you Ian. Hardly addresses my point tho. Forgive me if I don’t give out brownie points. Curiously you want to embellish it with a “front of the queue” comment – which just sounds like another back-handed insult. If tenants aren’t asking you for your I.D right now, then we both know very well why that it is.
Colin Lunt says
What do we or should we know about anything?
I was going y
to meet up with my brother in a car park not long after I had bought a new (old car). He asked me what car I had and I told him truthfully that it was blue. I had to go back and look at it and find the make before I could tell him!
Ben Reeve-Lewis says
Reb I get where Ian is coming from and I think, strangely, he wants what I want…..a Savvy renter.
This afternoon I was in the property that is about to be closed down under a Prohibition notice. One of the tenants I spoke to mid afternoon conducted the whole session from his bed. When I asked who his landlord of 5 years was he didnt know. When I aksed how much the rent was, he didnt know….said it was all paid for by HB.
I’m sorry but there is a man asking to be duped.
The worst landlords can take the piss out of tenants, push them around, cause them to move continuously but not if they know a few basic rights.
If tenants themselves dont bother to learn some basic stuff they are leaving themselves prey to the worst of the worst.
Ian said he would value such a tenant and I’m on a mission to crate them
Ian says
Ben,
You got it in one.
I had a tenant last year that did not tell me that the front door could not be locked because she had lost my contact details. (A savvy renter would have know her support worker and housing standards had them!)
When there was an issue with housing benefit, she said she could not phone me as she had no credit and was waiting until I come round to the property. (By that time I had fixed a label to her hallway with my contact details on!)
So please can I have a savvy renter! They are so much less work. (She is now the problem of the local housing trust.)
She came with the property, it was in such a state that a savvy renter would not have taken it on, buy by taking it on, she delayed getting a good home until I gave her a S21 etc.
Rent Rebel says
Two of the most bemusing posts I’ve ever read. Informing tenants of their rights Ben will do little to help these case studies, I think !
Ian wants a savvy renter , you say? Ah if only we had what The Guardian has – which is a nice history of our comments.
The tone of your last paragraph shows you up, and lets you down once again, Ian. You actually want to blame the victim of poor housing for ‘being stupid enough’ to accept it in the first place, and then make out you did her a favour by serving a section 21. That’s very messed up.
Ian says
I did do her a favor; there is no way the property could have been made reasonable with anyone living in it. Housing standards should have hit its last owner with a prohibition notice along with a lot of his other properties. (I brought it at auction with no internal viewings, but had met the tenant and the first thing she said to me was “please evict me”!)
As we speak, it is being striped back to brick; so far this week 4 skips about the same last week…. Already found 14 tons of bricks with nothing holding them up! Dust is over 1inch deep on the floors and the works has hardly started.
Rent Rebel says
Ah. There’s the ommitted detail. Your tenant must surely be much better-off now tho eh… because… (point about landlord checks not being obligatory or enforceable are completely lost on the audience. – never mind)
Ben Reeve-Lewis says
Reb, I’m bemused by your bemusedness :)
I count myself a tenants rights activist. I cant be bothered with placards and protests but I use my knowledge and training skills without pay to help start tenants rights groups and help them learn their rights.
I write widely on the unfairness of the renting system on this blog and occasionally in the Guardian.
But having spent 25 years of my working life dealing with criminal end of landlord tenant disputes I cant buy into a simplistic notion of landlord bad – tenant good. Its far more complex than that.
Ian and I may see each other’s point on this thread but we have had our hissy fits with each other at different times.
I have a lot of issues with landlords as a whole but I recognise that they are half of the picture too. They arent going to go away so us tenants have to engage in what will always be an uneasy and sometimes heated dialogue with them.
I came up with the 5 essential points for the savvy renter from seeing the major ways that tenants get hoodwinked by criminals, which are the landlords I work with, not reasonable people like Ian, who I reserve the right to disagree with at any time. Even though we’ve never met.
Do you know what number one is? Tessa covered this point a couple of weeks back “A tenancy is a form of ownership, which allows the tenant to exclude anyone they dont want from the property, including the owner”. So yes…..things like that will do well to protect tenants
Landlords and I could probably argue all week about the finer points of this but it doesnt mean I dont respect their right to have an opinion. They are half of the picture after all and its a free country.
I’m pro rent control for London and I’m hotly against no fault and retaliatory eviction but I’m not going to take issue with every landlord who expresses an opinion I dont agree with.
I dare say that you and I would find more to agree with in a pub than Ian and I but the fact of the matter is I do meet tenants who sleepwalk through their renting issues and, as unpalatable as this may sound I have also met many tenants who have offered to pay their own eviction expenses so they can get rehoused by the council.
It doesnt mean that I havent met landlords who have stabbed their tenants or beaten them senseless. I have. and its a complex world
Rent Rebel says
Oh Ben. Your posts are a little long, and forgive me, but you might do well to work out what your conclusion is before posting them?
You’re on the side of tenants, I know! And you have a wealth of knowledge; which I take great joy in reading. (I wd miss you terribly on this blog, and very much hope I might meet you some day to thank you in person for your contribution to it). But these long posts read like sermons. (intentional or not – i’m not sure).
Please leave it up to me to decide what I might respond to or “take issue with”. My comments and opinions are my own, I don’t seek validation or back-up. People can and will speak for themselves.
Re: bemused..
You implied that “only the worst” landlords cause tenants to move all the time; which is very misleading.
“Be informed” was your other message. (of course I agree) But your case study was totally off-topic and you came very close to victim blaming there.. (he’s “asking for it”). What it seems you tried to say is “tenants must help themselves”. Very true ! But should you have a feckless one, pls don’t sound so vitriolic when you come to evict them. The language used in both comments was, at best, troubling.
My reply is equally long now… !
Audrey @ Move out Mates says
Boys and their squabbles…
Fact of the matter is:
It’s every persons’s civil duty to know and protect their rights regarding any matter. Be it their basic human rights, their tenant rights or any other..
That said, yes there are scammers on both sides of the frontline.
There are scumbags that would occupy a property the minute they have the keys. You can’t throw them out for at least two months, so better pray to whatever God you have there is something of value in the flat when you finally get the bailiffs in..
There are also scumbags that would let to you only to later extort you for as much as they can strip off your back. You will either finally give up and bail with your losses, or fight them in the courts for any chance of financial reimbursement, but then still have to look for a new home.
If there was only one right and correct side, this tenant/landlord thing was never going to get that complicated.
And since it already is as complicated as it can get, a person can only trust himself and prepare for the worst. That said you need to know and protect your rights if you want to be treated properly, no matter what side of the fence you are. Anything else will burn you sooner or later, but it will inevitably.
To underline my conclusion:
All of you are right. That is the core of the problem.
Ben Reeve Lewis says
@ Reb on long posts……….you see how easy it is???? haha
Actually if I post in the evening I’m usually a glass of wine or two down, I put it down to that and the fact that I’m a chatterbox, which is why I train. I can talk about housing for 6 hours straight.
Sorry if I occasionally sermonise.