Find Property That Suits Your Lifestyle

• If it has a huge garden, do you want to spend every weekend mowing the lawn?
• If the high spec kitchen has beautiful wooden worktops, do you want to spend whole days oiling them to keep them watertight?
• How will you stand contractually if you do neither?
• If the property is cheap because the heating is all electric – can you afford the much higher bills?
• If the property has an electric meter (especially pre-pay card types) has the meter been calibrated by the electricity supplier to cover a previous debt by the last tenant? If so, it will need returning to the usual rates before you begin paying.
• If it’s an oil-fired heating system, where do you order oil – but not enough to last way beyond your own tenancy?
• If there’s insufficient heating, do you really want to use the landlord’s lethal paraffin heater?
• If the third bedroom’s too small to be any use do you want to pay extra for it?

 

And on, and on. Before you sign a thing ask and then think.

Making That Judgement Call

We all make instantaneous judgements all the time. It’s an instinct thing. Trust it. If the landlord in front of you makes your skin crawl find somewhere else. If the agent can’t be bothered, makes you feel that they’re doing you a favour by turning out, thinks you’re a bore to have important questions – find somewhere else. If there’s no adequate reply to who you’d call in emergencies – find somewhere else. You are trying to rent a home, not a car for the weekend.

There are things that you need to know are in place because badly managed homes are a nightmare for tenants, who are left holding all the problems with none of the control. Beware the young buccaneering landlord who’s only willing to give you a mobile phone number. Get a landline and check it works before you sign leases.

Management of rental property requires organisation, planning and consistency. Someone to call when you lose your keys. Someone to fix the hot water system. You’re not allowed to fix things yourself and have already paid for things to work so look for an organised manager – either agency or competent independent – and you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

Use your commonsense. Look at how existing tenants are treated and you’ll get a fairly good flavour of your future as a tenant there.

Understanding The Role Of Agencies

Agencies are not voluntary organisations who run services for love. They are commercial middlemen who charge whatever they can, to whoever seems likeliest to pay it, because that’s commerce. Understanding that will allow you to behave like informed users of the services they offer. So charges will be made for inventory preparation, and for the final inspection when you move out and at every other single opportunity that presents itself in between and after you leave.

All cost top whack – many tenants are charged more than £200 simply for the drawing up and signing of a lease. Understand that from the outset and do your sums accordingly.

Understanding The Role Of Independent Landlords

Again, commerce not community service is the goal of any self-respecting private landlord. Where they differ from agencies is that their costs (not organisational abilities) should be lower because they don’t pay middlemen. Few private landlords charge set up fees for the right to take a lease. Most use legal stationers’ leases, which cost a couple of pounds, not a couple of hundred. Nor will many consider charging you for three signatures. In a competitive market, few private landlords try to make a profit on references, they use the reference process to safeguard their investment, not for profit.

What you must understand here is the scale of operations you’re trying to compare. For most private landlords with, say, a dozen or so properties, a few pounds referencing profit are utterly immaterial – and not worth deterring anyone over. For an agency with many hundreds, even thousands of properties trading each year, these small additional charges everywhere add up to huge revenue generators.

Instead, the private landlord makes his/her money from charging you enough rent to make a profit over and above their own costs. Some will charge inventory fees because they genuinely do take time to compile, agree on and check out. (You need to ask exactly what charges any independent has in mind before agreeing to accept anything.) For expensive units, many will suggest sharing the cost of a completely independent inventory – so no profit there either. Plus, for what it’s worth, I’ve never met one independent landlord who would charge a good tenant wanting to stay beyond six months some ‘lease extension fee’ for the privilege of having a good customer pay for longer.