NEW: Property educators urged to join reform group’s first national summit

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Property educators are being urged to collaborate, learn, and shape the future of property education at The Property Investors Bureau Property Educators Summit.

The invitation-only industry event aims to improve standards, foster collaboration, and add value to their business by providing a neutral environment to engage in discussions, share insights, and explore innovative approaches to property education.

Attendees can join three industry workshops that cover key topics relevant to the property education sector: Discover the Power of Strategic Collaborations: Unlock Your Business Potential, presented by Hanif Khan, angel investor and strategy and partnership specialist; Discover the Keys to Legally Protecting Yourself and Your Valued Customers! presented by David Smith (pictured), partner in JMW Solicitors; and The Future of the Property Investment Industry: Exploring the Metaverse and AI, presented by Daniel Colaianni, CEO of AIXR.

Attendees can also take part in a Property Educators Town Hall event, facilitated by Cyril Thomas, Property Investors Bureau chairman.

This event will provide a platform for property educators to connect with industry leaders, engage in stimulating discussions, and build a supportive community.

“The Property Educators Summit 2023 is a pivotal event that brings together the brightest minds in property education,” says Thomas (pictured).

“We believe that by fostering collaboration and encouraging innovative thinking, we can shape the future of property education and elevate industry standards to new heights.”

Tickets for the summit – at the luxury Biltmore Hotel in London on 14th July – cost £299 +VAT for Property Education Accreditation Scheme (PEAS) members and £499 +VAT for non-members. Non-members must apply for their PEAS accreditation and will then receive a 25% discount on their ticket price. Apply for PEAS accreditation here.

For tickets call 01206 700 123, email info@pibuk.org or visit https://pibuk.org/property-educators-summit

LandlordZONE backs the PEAS initiative and is a member of its ‘social council’. PEAS was set up to help reform and reshape the property educators sector, and help investors looking for training to find ‘the good guys’.

View Full Article: NEW: Property educators urged to join reform group’s first national summit

Renting to a prospective purchaser?

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Hi all, I am in the process of selling my mother’s house, which is empty and have had a prospective buyer since March.

However, there have been some problems regarding the sale and this has caused the transaction to take much longer than usual and may still take another 3 to 4 months for completion.

View Full Article: Renting to a prospective purchaser?

Illegal evictions increasing ‘dramatically’ says leading tenancy group

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Illegal evictions and harassment by rogue landlords are increasing as tenants struggle to pay their rent and some landlords resort to criminal means to remove tenants as the court system falters and some landlords seek to exploit soaring rents, according to Safer Renting.

Figures compiled by the charity from sources including Citizens Advice, Shelter, and local authorities show there were more than 8,000 instances of illegal eviction or harassment during 2022 – an increase on 7,800 cases in 2021 and 6,900 cases in 2020. It says figures are likely to go up again this year.

Safer Renting – a tenancy relations service operating in seven London boroughs – estimates that many more cases go unreported and believes that too often, the police side with the landlord or treat it as a civil dispute, while councils rarely take action because they have lost so many specialist tenancy-relations officers during austerity.

“More data needs to be collected so that there is evidence behind the arguments,” a spokesman tells LandlordZONE, “while the penalties for breaching the law are not high enough.”

DIY evictions

The spokesperson adds that the organisatoin supports the proposed landlord register but that in the meantime, while Section 21 remains and the court system is backed up with cases, it would expect to see an increase in landlords resorting to DIY evictions.

Safer Renting also points to the spate of criminal landlords increasingly turning to private security companies to get tenants to leave their homes without a court order.

“In the past, criminal landlords may have sent heavies to throw tenants out, but this is the first time in 33 years of working in the private rented sector that I’ve seen fake bailiffs kitted out with stab vests, radios and handcuffs,” co-founder Ben Reeve-Lewis (pictured) tells The Guardian. “Some of them even have vans with police-like livery on the side.”

Read more about evictions.

View Full Article: Illegal evictions increasing ‘dramatically’ says leading tenancy group

AGENT: London rental market to be ‘most competitive ever’ this summer

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Prospective tenants flooding into London this summer – along with the continued shrinkage in property numbers – is set to create one of the most competitive rental markets ever seen.

May bank holiday is when many 12-month and 18-month tenancies come to an end, explains Adam Jennings (main picture), regional lettings director for Chestertons’ southwest London area.

He says this time of year also heralds an increase in short-term summer rentals, when students finish exams and begin searching for somewhere to live, and companies start relocating staff to so that children can be ready for the new school term.

Far fewer

“With many landlords having sold their investments over the past few years, and many experienced tenants negotiating in order to extend their tenancies to three years or more, there will be far fewer properties available for all of these new tenants,” he says.

“This will create one of the most competitive markets that we’ve seen and is likely to nudge prices up further.”

Jennings expects there will be about 10% more properties coming onto the market in June, but this will be dwarfed by the number of tenants looking to move.

Uplift

Last year, Chestertons registered 23% more tenants in June compared to May and is expecting a similar uplift this year.

As a result, rents, which have been flattening out since last autumn, could rise by as much as 15-20% over the next few months, which means now is an ideal time for landlords to list their property, he adds.

Landlords with properties in central London saw the highest levels of tenant demand across England and Wales in the last quarter of 2022. Earlier this year, Foxtons reported that 2022 had 32% fewer listings in the capital than 2021 while demand remained high, finishing the year 14% higher.

Read more about rent rises.

View Full Article: AGENT: London rental market to be ‘most competitive ever’ this summer

LAW: Agent faces £10,000 bill after licencing fine appeal rejected

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A managing agent who failed to licence a property has had his appeal thrown out by a First Tier Property Tribunal.

Taren Lamba tried to convince the judge that he was not in control of the property in Kenwood Road, London (main picture) by insisting that all he did was take in the rents on behalf of his company Smart Move and then pass them onto the freeholder landlord, making an annual charge.

The tribunal heard that Enfield Council had fined him £10,000 after an inspection in December 2021 found the house was occupied by a tenant and family.

Enforcement officers discovered defective front and rear doors as well as no valid licence, despite a selective licence scheme having been introduced three months earlier.

At the hearing, Lamba also argued that the financial penalty was too high and that he hadn’t received several items of correspondence from the council.

Those items he received he had either referred to the freeholder or responded directly to them.

Enfield Council said its scheme was widely publicised to landlords, managing and letting agents within the borough before its introduction and that information was publicised on the authority’s website. 

Failure

The judge ruled that Lamba’s failure to submit any evidence of compliance with the licensing scheme clearly hindered his case and that it was clear he had control of the property because he received the rack rent. The tribunal added: “We consider that the amount set by the respondent in the sum of £10,000 to be a reasonable amount for an offence of this type, since the local authority scored the matrix with care and took into consideration the requirements of their explicit scheme.”

Read the decision in full.

Read more about property licencing. 

View Full Article: LAW: Agent faces £10,000 bill after licencing fine appeal rejected

Skylights repair project?

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Hello, I have a Victorian building that is three storeys and has eight flats and was converted many decades ago.  The building has three skylights on the roof, which is the ceiling (flat roof) for two flats. These are fixed non-vented (not windows per se)

View Full Article: Skylights repair project?

UK’s rental market soars: Record highs and regional disparities

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Landlords and tenants in the UK have witnessed average rent costs for a new tenancy rocketing by 10% year-on-year, reaching £1,213, research reveals.

The Homelet rental index for May also reveals that the monthly rise in rent last month was 1.2%.

View Full Article: UK’s rental market soars: Record highs and regional disparities

OPINION: Rental Reform – will it work in England?

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Across the UK nations there’s been a rolling programme of rental reform, one new tenancy regime after another, but has any of this really worked for the benefit of tenants or landlords?

We don’t yet know the final form the Renters (Reform) Bill will take, there’s a long way to go yet as the Bill progresses through Parliament, but we do know roughly the shape of things to come, and we can conjecture their likely impact.

More tenant protection

In this, the third decade of the 21st century, we can discern the direction of travel, the way tenancy laws are going across Great Britain. That direction is away from free-market “lighter touch” landlord friendly regulation as introduced by the Assured Shorthold Tenancy in 1988. There’s now in progress a swing back in the direction of pre-1988, the 20th century era of greater tenant protection.

I worry that far from improving the rental market in England for landlords and tenants, this Bill could end up making life more difficult for both, while at the same time imposing an enormous cost burden on the country in terms of lawmakers’ time, courts’ time, and that of the judiciary making endless amendments, not to mention the additional cost to landlords and tenants.

An international journey to reform…

The Irish Republic on these isles (though not in GB) led the charge with their Residential Tenancies Act 2004 (as amended). This offered far greater security of tenure for Irish tenants coupled with a degree of rent control, what they termed “Rent Pressure Zones”.

This was followed closely in Scotland by the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 with similar scope and effects, and more recently in Wales with the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, effective 1 December 2022.

These reforming laws affect residential tenancies in the jurisdictions in different ways, with differing rules and regulations in each, but with similar overall results. Without doubt all this new legislation must have involved many thousands of hours of civil service and law makers’ time.

There’s no doubt that some of these measures have modernised and improved tenant safety and security, for example. Some regulations needed tightening up. But as far I can see, there’s no evidence that any of this monumental effort has improved the letting market in any of these nations – no discernable improvement in the supply of affordable accommodation for renters? In fact, just the opposite appears to be the case.

The Economist Nov 2017:

“Last month a survey of 13,000 expatriates put Dublin fifth from bottom of a list of 51 global cities, ranked by quality of life. Their main gripe (as with Paris, which finished two places lower, sandwiched between Riyadh and Jeddah) was not a sudden collapse in the city’s charm, safety or amenity but its high cost of living, and in particular the difficulty of finding somewhere to stay.”

Edinburgh News April 2023:

“Housing crisis: Tenants in Edinburgh forking out nearly half of salary on rent. Rents are likely to be pushed up further as a shortage of properties sees tenants chasing a limited number of homes.”

The Bevan Foundation Sept 2022:

“New research illustrates the severe shortage of rental properties for low-income households in Wales. As the cost of living continues to skyrocket, Wales’ most influential think-tank, the Bevan Foundation, has revealed the scale of the challenge faced by low-income households trying to find a home in the private rental sector.”

In England the story is no different, and these sweeping reforms have yet to come.

Daily Telegraph September 2022:

“Britain is stumbling towards a Euro-style rental catastrophe. The unrelenting war on private landlords is going to backfire spectacularly. In Ireland, foreign exchange students are forced to live in tents because of the shortage of homes to rent. In Sweden, the market has just about collapsed. And Berlin has just been forced by the constitutional court to end a catastrophic experiment in price controls…

“The [UK] Government has spent five years waging a war on landlords. The predictable result? Many of them are pulling out of the market, sending prices soaring and creating intense supply shortages. In a country made up of as many renters as homeowners, that matters more than ever. In truth, we urgently need to build more homes, both to buy and rent – but the war on landlords is going to backfire spectacularly.”

Change is coming…

Enter the Renters (Reform) Bill in England. Yet another radical change of rules and regulations to be added to several hundred laws already affecting the Private Rented Sector (PRS). This work is aimed at improving the tenant’s lot, but with no guarantee it will make a tenant’s life any easier. Again, despite the many thousands of lawmakers’ hours devoted to producing these new laws, some experts feel they will not make a jot of difference, and indeed could make matters far worse.

The Government says the new Bill will “bring in a better deal for renters” by abolishing the paper based “no fault” Section 21 eviction process and switching to a county court based Section 8 procedure. This is said to be a fault-based process based on specific grounds for eviction and an end to fixed-term tenancies. It will entail beefing up the Section 8, grounds for eviction.

Fixed-term tenancies will be abolished, and while tenants will be able to leave at any time by giving a short notice, landlords will only be able to terminate a tenancy if they have a good reason (capable of convincing a county court judge), if they want to sell, or they or a relative want to live in the property.

As I understand it there is to be a data-base of landlords, their rental properties, and their tenancies, a monumental administrative task. This no doubt is to be paid for by landlords, along with several other measures in the Bill, all of which will eventually get passed on to tenants in the form of increased rents.

Landlords will no longer be able to refuse applicants who are receiving benefits and tenants will be given the right to request a pet, which landlords cannot unreasonably refuse, though some provision will be made to require tenants to take out pet insurance.

The Bill, says the Government, recognises that “responsible landlords” face challenges of their own and wants to “celebrate the overwhelming majority of landlords who do a good job”. More comprehensive grounds for possession will, it says, give landlords “peace of mind that they can repossess their property when a tenant is behaving badly, or their circumstances change”.

Housing Secretary, Michael Gove, has said:

“Our new laws introduced to Parliament today will support the vast majority of responsible landlords who provide quality homes to their tenants, while delivering our manifesto commitment to abolish Section 21 ‘no-fault’ evictions. This will ensure that everyone can live somewhere which is decent, safe and secure – a place they’re truly proud to call home.”

The Government has been under political pressure for many years from the cause célèbre of the housing charities and the media to abolish Section 21. They committed at the last election to replace it with a system which will mean every eviction needs a court appearance – or use the promised enhanced electronic court process – yet to be devised, in what seems to many an already a failing county court system. If you think the court process is slow now, I suggest you wait until this new law comes in.

Apparently the new measures will make it easier to remove tenants causing nuisance with anti-social behaviour. But it’s never going to be easy to deal with this because the issues will always be complicated and need to go before a court, solid evidence will be required, and the process is a snail’s pace slow.

As Ian Narbeth, solicitor at DMH Stallard argues that word changes (strengthening) Section 8 grounds, while abolishing section 21 will mean the government is helping nuisance tenants at the expense of the weak and vulnerable…

“Lawyers may argue about the subtle change in wording, but most cases don’t get to court and by the time they do, the behaviour is serious and anti-social – not just capable of being so. Until now, landlords served section 21 notices on anti-social tenants and did not need to go to court.

“With the massive backlog in cases, it can be many months before cases are heard, witnesses may fear harassment by an aggressive neighbour or their family and friends, while landlords can give no guarantee of succeeding and witnesses will fear reprisals, especially if the eviction fails.

“Instead of landlords dealing with the problem simply and confidentially, abolishing section 21 means troublemakers must have their day in court and many victims will choose to suffer in silence or else leave their homes rather than give evidence. The government will be helping nuisance tenants at the expense of the weak and vulnerable, which is the opposite of what it is claiming.”

Kate Faulkner OBE, argues in a recent podcast, that the new rules could actually make it easier to remove unwanted tenants and get your rental property back. And I can see how this might be the case, but what might be possible in theory, given the delays in the system, I just don’t see it happening in practice.

Secondly, the way the wording of Ground 1 stands, it leaves lots of loopholes for unscrupulous landlords to remove tenants by devious means. I can see lots of court cases coming up, and amendments being made, if things stay the same as they are in this Bill.

Small-scale landlords

According to the latest available English Private Landlord Survey published May 2022, just under half of all landlords owned one rental property, though nearly half of tenancies were owned by landlords with five or more properties. 43% of landlords owned one rental property, representing 20% of tenancies. A further 39% owned between two and four rental properties, representing 31% of tenancies. The remaining 18% of landlords owned five or more properties, representing almost half (48%) of tenancies.

What landlords need…

So, by far the majority of landlords in England are small-scale, they’ve invested their hard earned savings, on which they’ve already paid tax, plus borrowings, into rental property. This is mainly because ostensibly bricks and mortar offer a high degree of security – people feel safe with property as opposed to the stock market. Other cash investments, banks and the building societies, have until recently offered derisory returns.

But all that has changed: high inflation, higher mortgage rates, penalising income tax rates on buy-to-let income, a stamp duty surcharge and reduced capital gains tax allowances, all make it difficult to show a profit for any landlord with a mortgage to pay.

Couple this with increasingly onerous regulations, energy efficiency standards requiring substantial further investment for some, and now a radical change in the renting laws through this new Bill. It all adds up to a recipe for driving good landlords out of business.

In my view the Government should be doing everything in its power to encourage landlords to invest in the PRS, to use their own capital rather than public money to provide the housing we desperately need. I’m sorry but I don’t think this Bill will achieve that in its present form. In fact, as many are predicting, it will probably do the opposite.

View Full Article: OPINION: Rental Reform – will it work in England?

BREAKING: Evictions stopped as bailiffs reduce workload over safety concerns

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Landlords face even longer waits than normal to evict tenants in London after two big landlords were told that bailiff operations are to be suspended for the ‘foreseeable future’.

This unusual situation has been blamed by officials on unspecified ‘health and safety reasons’ but the effect has already been chilling on evictions, with one bailiff reporting an 80% reduction in case load.

LandlordZONE understands the health and safety reasons are that bailiffs are being required to attend properties with more personnel to protect staff and this has brought the system to a halt.

One of the bailiff companies involved says it is now running a ‘skeleton’ service until normal service returns, and that many landlords will now have to turn to the more expensive High Court bailiff route if they want to evict.

London landlords wishing to evict tenants are served by a clutch of magistrates’ courts and it is one of the biggest – the Central London Court (main picture) – that has sent out an email warning that bailiff appointments have been suspended for the ‘forseeable’ future.

Eviction changes

Anyone evicting via the courts through a Section 8 notice must first prove the ‘grounds for eviction’ in front of a magistrate before a possession order is granted and, after that, a warrant issued with a date permitting a bailiff to repossess the property – a route all landlords will have to take soon once Section 21 is abolished.

Landlord Action says one of its cases due for eviction yesterday was suspended with no new date in sight.

“Our clients, whilst sympathetic to the bailiffs’ concerns, have already been waiting in some cases many, many months for an appointment,” says Paul Sowerbutts (pictured) of Landlord Action.

“Other than an expensive and quite frankly very risky application to the High Court this news will add significantly to our clients’ difficulties.”

The Ministry of Justice has been approached for comment.

View Full Article: BREAKING: Evictions stopped as bailiffs reduce workload over safety concerns

Landlord Crusader: Why PRS landlords should protect social housing tenants

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We all know that the UK is facing a housing crisis, and the blame for this is usually placed at the feet of landlords in the private rented sector (PRS).

That’s despite private landlords providing quality accommodation for millions of tenants.

View Full Article: Landlord Crusader: Why PRS landlords should protect social housing tenants