Landlords fight criticism and highlight huge costs of evicting lawless tenants

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A large regional landlord association has launched a campaign to highlight the expensive problems many buy-to-let investors face when tenants go rogue.

The Eastern Landlord Association says it wants to tell the other side of the story after the region’s newspaper revealed that some 10,000 complaints have been made by private tenants to Suffolk council about their property or landlord over the past five years.

Chairman John Pitts has hit back telling The East Anglian Times that instead of being blamed for poor standards, private landlords should be incentivised to provide housing stock, given the shortage of affordable council homes.

Commenting on recent research by trade body Propertymark which found that 20% of landlords are considering selling all or part of their portfolios during 2022, Pitts said if such predictions were true then it would ‘catastrophic’ for tenants.

Rogue tenants

The association has also highlighted several landlords in the region who between them have lost tens of thousands of pounds in repairs and court costs after rogue tenants damaged their properties or stopped paying the rent.

This includes Terry Baccus, a landlord with three properties in the region who, after tenants trashed a terraced house of his in Lowestoft, says existing eviction rules do not give small landlords like him enough protection from rogue renters.

He found that the tenants, who deliberately flooded the kitchen of the property once it became clear they would be evicted, had been paid their Universal Credit rent direct via the DWP but had not passed it on for nearly two years, despite being given a rent reduction by Baccus to help them manage their bills. The property is now on the market after Baccus vowed that ‘enough is enough’.

Picture credit: Terry Baccus.

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