For many property owners, letting out their property to renters is an obvious way of generating a passive income for themselves. However, before you consider letting out your property, it is important that you understand exactly what is involved.
How To Rent: The Checklist For Renting In England
The How To Rent checklist for renters in England is an important document that landlords are legally required to provide their tenants with a copy of. It is both a landlord how to rent guide and a guide for renters that informs them of their rights and obligations. Landlords should also give this document a read, so they are aware of its contents. Legally, landlords cannot pursue no-fault (section 21) eviction order against a tenant unless they have been provided with an up to date version of this checklist.
Landlord How To Rent Guide
The first section covers assured shorthold tenancies. The majority of tenancies in the UK are assured shorthold tenancies. Whenever a renter enters into such a tenancy agreement, they are entering into a contractual arrangement with the landlord. It is, therefore, important that they and their landlords understand exactly what is expected of them under a shorthold tenancy agreement.
Ensuring that your tenants understand exactly what an assured shorthold tenancy involves isn’t just a legal obligation. Having tenants that understand their rights and obligations will make life easier for you as a landlord, as it will reduce the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication.
The next section of the guide walks tenants through the key questions that they need to ask before they commit to renting a property. These questions are designed to enable the tenant to confirm that you are a legitimate landlord and that their plans for renting a property are realistic in both financial and practical terms.
Thie section also covers the different routes that tenants can take to find the right property for them. Whether they choose to rent directly from a landlord or they opt to go through a letting agent instead, renters need to know what to look for and how to avoid scams.
Renters’ Obligations
As well as helping renters to avoid common scams and other pitfalls that come with renting from the private sector, the How To Rent guide also sets out what obligations tenants have and what the expectations are for their behaviour.
For example, the guide impresses the importance of paying both rent and utility bills on time. It also lets the renter know that they need to seek the landlord’s permission before they commission or undertake any repairs, renovations, or decoration of the property.
Making sure that your renters are just as aware of their obligations as they are of their rights will eliminate a lot of potential headaches for both of you.
What Is PCM London Rent?
Working out the appropriate rate of rent to charge tenants is essential for any landlord. If you set your rates too high, then you will end up deterring potential renters from taking the plunge on your property. On the other hand, if you set your rents lower than the going market rate, you will be forfeiting income for little to no gain. You should work out the appropriate level of rent to charge long before you consider advertising the property to potential renters.
How Much Rent To Charge Calculator UK
For many landlords, using a rent calculator is the simplest way of working out how much rent they should be charging. Using these calculators, landlords only need to put in a few bits of basic information about the property in question and they can immediately get an idea of what a fair rent would be.
What Are Your Responsibilities As A Landlord?
Some people think that the life of a landlord is as easy as could be and all they have to do is sit back and watch the money roll in. Of course, in reality, things are very different. If everything is going smoothly and both the landlord and tenant are living up to their own obligations, then both parties should have an easy enough time. However, even when both the landlord and tenant are living up to their obligations, there is always room for things to go wrong unexpectedly.
It is important that you, as the landlord, are just as aware of your own obligations as your tenants are of theirs. Should there be any unforeseen issues with the property itself or the utilities that supply it, you need to know what to do. In many cases, it will be your responsibility to fix the issue and you need to respond to the situation promptly.
In more general terms, landlords are responsible for ensuring that the properties that they rent out are physically safe for tenants to inhabit. That means that there are no obvious safety hazards that might affect your tenants and that any hazards are rectified as soon as they are identified. For example, this means ensuring that gas, electricity, and other utilities are safely installed and remain properly maintained.
Under UK law, landlords are also expected to check whether their tenants have the right to rent a property from them or not. Before a landlord is legally allowed to rent their property out to any tenants, they are required to confirm that those tenants have a right to rent in the UK. This applies even to tenants that aren’t named on the tenancy agreement, and also applied to tenants in cases where there is no formal agreement, or the agreement is not in writing.
Energy Performance Certificate
An energy performance certificate is an important legal document that is needed whenever a property is bought, sold, or rented out. Before a property owner can put their property up for sale or make all of it or part of it available to rent, they need to order an energy performance certificate (EPC). This certificate will contain information regarding the energy efficiency of the property and give any potential occupants, be they buyers or renters, an idea of how much they can expect to pay in energy bills.
An EPC will also provide recommendations for improving the energy efficiency of a property and, therefore, reducing the energy bills associated with it. The EPC gives the property a rating, which can range from A (representing the most energy-efficient properties) to G (those that are the least efficient). Each EP certificate is valid for 10 years.
If you are letting out your property as holiday accommodation, meaning that it will be rented out for less than four months a year, then you won’t need to obtain an EPC. However, in almost any other case where a property is being let out, an EPC is required.
Finding The Right Tenants
Lots of people envisage the life of a landlord as being as easy as sitting back and waiting for money to come rolling in. Unfortunately, the reality is often very different, and being a landlord can actually be an incredibly stressful experience. One thing that landlords can do to drastically reduce the amount of stress associated with their job is to carefully screen their tenants beforehand.
Having a rigorous vetting process in place will help you avoid being lumbered with unreliable tenants and having to deal with all the problems that come with them. Unreliable tenants mean inevitable missed and late rent payments, damage to your property, and a host of other potential issues.
Before you offer a tenancy agreement to anyone, you should be completely satisfied that they are going to be a suitable tenant. Obviously, you will want to make sure that any prospective tenants have a stable income and will be able to keep up with their payments. However, this is just one of the many things that you should check before making an offer to a new tenant.
For example, you will also want to conduct some basic background checks to make sure that the person is who they say they are, otherwise, you could be facing fines and other penalties for letting your property to someone you shouldn’t have.
In some cases, having a guarantor co-signing your tenant’s agreement and agreeing that they will pay the tenants’ rents should the tenant be unable to do so can make an otherwise unsuitable tenant into a worthwhile option.
There are letting agents like Greater London Properties that can help to find tenants on your behalf. This will take a lot of the work and worry out of the process. GLP will handle the screening process for you, saving you the trouble of vetting tenants for yourself.
If you are planning on letting out a property that you own in London, then it is essential that you understand exactly what you are getting into. As a landlord, you will have certain obligations that you must observe. Failure to do so can result in financial and legal penalties that no landlord wants to be dealing with. However, as long as you stick to all the necessary rules and guidance, letting a property out in London can be a reliable way of earning an income.
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