I realise I need to be careful because if I say I usually have little sympathy for my tenants or, for that matter, any tenants, I might be accused of being an uncaring, exploitative and manipulative landlord.
However, I suspect that like many landlords, I often find I have a somewhat edgy and nervous relationship with many of my tenants. Perhaps this is because many of them are on benefits. Again, I need to be careful what I say. Am I saying that being on benefits makes them bad people? No, of course not but my experience is that when letting to some (many) tenants on benefits they operate on different rules.
The one which winds me up the most is when they decide to do a moonlit flit, and a few weeks later I then get a bill from the local housing office demanding I repay overpaid housing benefit.
“Hang on” I argue, “under the terms of the tenancy the tenant as meant to give me 4 weeks notice so I’m entitled to that money”.
“Not interested” comes the usual retort and there all reasonable negotiation ends.
Come to think of it perhaps more of a wind-up is not paying the rent or, using the jargon of today, “pass on the benefit to the landlord”. For the life of me I can’t understand why claiming housing benefit (LHA) but not using that money for your rent isn’t benefits fraud, but apparently it isn’t because no one cares enough.
Or, then again, what about when they turn the spare bedroom into a cannabis farn. Yes I have experienced this but, perhaps with the ‘bedroom tax’, cultivating drugs on the premises will become financially unviable. Lol.
Ok, I don’t want to labour the point but I think that after 13 years of landlording, I think I can make a sound case for not having a lot of sympathy with tenants.
However, something happened recently which has made me think again.
I have to say that within my own personal value system is a dislike of large Government and regulation and so I’ve been watching calls for greater regulation of letting agents with some alarm.
As I’m not a letting agent you may wonder why but firstly my concern is that any regulation will make properties more expensive to let but, more importantly I’ve been wondering how it will effect my efforts on Gumtree which I have found to be a very cost effective and successful way to fill my empty properties.
With that in mind I posted ad to said Gumtree a few weeks ago with a view to helping my letting and managing agent who felt that one of properties would be quite hard to let, being in a somewhat questionable location.
Even so, I had quite a few calls which I duly passed over to my agents. But the curious thing was that nothing happened. Still no letting. Still no new tenant.
So after a while I contacted one of my respondees to find out what had happened.
“Oh, they said, “when we called they wanted £250 and for us to sign a load of papers before they’d even talk to us about it. I responded to your ad on Gumtree so I wouldn’t have to go through all that”.
Now I understood and I have to say I was slightly miffed. I’ve been with these agents for 7 years and they manage multiple properties of mine. They know this property isn’t the most attractive in the portfolio and is potentially the hardest to let. But will they help? It seems not, although the reality is it’s just an office clerk with no experience and no commercial outlook doing her job.
But it made me think. If letting agents all demand a ‘signing on’ fee of that magnitude then how can a potential tenant find a suitable property. Many can hardly afford to pay one ‘signing on’ fee let alone pay every agent in the locality. So the practical upshot is that many potential tenants will be offered property by only a limited number of letting agents – only those they can afford to pay.
As a landlord I find all this very concerning and am glad that questions are now being asked and fingers pointed. If it results in regulation, as it seems it will, then in the long-run that might actually be the best thing for the letting agents themselves as I can see there is the potential for them to put themselves out of business by deterring potential tenants from crossing the threshold of their offices.
In the meantime I’m now dealing with my own Gumtree enquiries and it remains to be seen if my agents retain my business!!
Here’s to successful property investing
Peter Jones B.Sc FRICS
By the way, I’ve rewritten and updated my best selling eBook, The Successful Property Investor’s Strategy Workshop, which is an account of how I put together my multi-property portfolio, starting from scratch and with no money of my own, and how you can do the same. For more details please go to ThePropertyTeacher.co.uk