I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year break and welcome back to the Landlord Law Blog.
Over the festive season, we have been doing some work here, and the blog is now hosted on The Rainmaker Platform. That probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it is an American service which will allow us to do more with the blog.
Here are a few of the current services:
Podcasts
Rainmaker is very good at managing podcasts. We now have two podcast series, the interviews and the surgeries which are arranged nicely on their index pages.
As you will see, each of the podcast pages have a nice little player on them plus a download link (if you want to download them to play on your smart phone or ipod) and also a link where you can subscribe on iTunes.
If you are not into podcasts yet but have a smart phone, you can sign up to get podcasts when you subscribe downloaded automatically to your iTunes app – so you can listen to them through headphones. For example when on a train or walking the dog.
The Landlords Free E-Course
This has been around for a while, but it is now updated and has been moved over to this website.
The course consists of 12 parts each looking at an important aspect of being a landlord – such as tenancy agreements, deposits and eviction of tenants.
You can sign up to this here.
(NB We also have a tenants e-course here).
The Blog Clinic
This has more or less been offline for a bit as, unknown to me, the Captcha wasn’t working. However, I have now corrected this and have also re-done the standard emails that get sent out to people who ask a question.
I have caught up with the backlog a bit, but there are still a lot of questions queued up in the free list, so if you have an important question you should use the ‘fast track’ service. Only £60 and you get the collected wisdom of Landlord Law Blog readers too!
You will find the blog clinic here.
Other things
Over time we will be doing more. The Weekly Roundup will be changing a bit to make it more informative for you (and Rainmaker makes it easier for me to put it together). You can sign up to get this, by the way, as an alternative to getting the posts every day (you can sign up to this here).
Note however that one of the old mailings for posts won’t work any more – the one that works via wordpress.com. So you may need to sign up again.
Patrick and I are looking at developing some audio books for you and I will be setting up an online shop to sell these and other items.
I may also develop and host some more courses on the blog – both paid for and free. If you have any suggestions let me know.
You may also find that the blog loads a bit quicker and that generally, it is easier to use and move around in. I hope so anyway.
Apologies
Finally, if you subscribe to get blog posts by email, I think you may have had some old posts sent to you. I have no idea why these were sent, it is probably something to do with the site move. Apologies for this, had I know they were going out I would have tried to stop them!
Happy New Year!
Why are the words ‘Tenant’ and ‘Landlord’ used to cover so many different types of Tenant-Landlord relationship?
Given they are the same words to refer to rental agreements, short leasehold agreements and long-leasehold agreements, it is very difficult to decipher exactly which aspects of the law relate to the particular relationship in each case.
It creates a confusion that abusive landlords exploit to their advantage. The Local Council also appear to restrict their services to problems between a renting or short-term Tenant, and not to long-leaseholders.
I have spent hours reading about laws relating to Tenants, only to find that most of it doesn’t apply in my situation. Unfortunately, your blog also appears to address mainly issues relating to Tenants in rental agreements of one sort or another.
Yes, it can be confusing. I tend to use the word ‘tenancy’ for a short term let, normally 6 months or a year, and ‘lease’ for a longer let, such as 99 years.
If you are looking for long lease advice, it’s probably best to search under ‘lease’ and ‘leaseholder’.