Landlords are absorbing losses from their savings

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The majority of private landlords helping tenants out during the pandemic by cutting their rent absorbed the losses from their savings according to new research.

The research conducted by BVA/BDRC for the National Residential Landlords Association shows that sixty-one per cent of those landlords who

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Portsmouth launches novel scheme to help landlords prevent evictions

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A trailblazing new mediation service for landlords and tenants in Portsmouth aims to settle rent disputes and avoid costly legal battles and evictions.

The pilot, run by Portsmouth Mediation Service and sponsored by the city council, offers support from a team of independent mediators for tenants behind on their rent, who can be referred by its private housing team.

Sixteen landlords have already been trained, armed with a ‘restorative toolkit’ in the hope it will reduce the need for repossession court action.

One of very few similar schemes in the country, it has a good chance of success because the local council is engaged in the process, says Alwin Oliver (main picture), vice-chair of the Portsmouth & District Private Landlords Association, a driving force behind the scheme. He has already engaged with some of his tenants, one of whom is on a repayment plan.

“We’ve tried to design something that works and hope it will grow and evolve,” Oliver tells LandlordZONE.

“We have trained landlords in the essential communication techniques so that they can avoid confrontation at the early stages, to get the tenancy back under control using a more sympathetic approach. Once a notice has been served, you’ve closed a door. Mediation works best early on in the process.”

Simple ideas

He explains that this can start with something as simple as putting a note on a rent chase email, suggesting the tenant approaches a Citizens Advice law centre if they need to ask for help.

Oliver adds that it’s hoped there will eventually be a direct link with Portsmouth’s possession courts to flag up cases sooner.

As LandlordZONE reported earlier this week, the government’s legal boss Sir Geoffrey Voss wants to expand the role of ‘dispute resolution’ as an alternative to courts in a bid to speed up evictions and other types of civil litigation.

Following a pilot scheme launched in February, there is an ongoing MOJ consultation into dispute resolution. Several national privately-run mediation schemes also exist.

Read more about Portsmouth landlords.

©1999 – Present | Parkmatic Publications Ltd. All rights reserved | LandlordZONE® – Portsmouth launches novel scheme to help landlords prevent evictions | LandlordZONE.

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The cost of Bonfire Night mishaps

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Bonfire Night, with its accompanying fireworks display, continues to be one of the most widely-celebrated events in the calendar. Towns and cities, small and large, will be hosting public displays throughout the country, but with COVID-19 still a concern for some

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MPC voted by 7-2 to maintain Bank Rate at 0.1%

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The Doves in the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted by a majority of 7 -2 to not increase the Bank Base Rate in the face of current inflationary pressures. They also voted not to alter the current Quantitative Easing program and maintain the level of monetary stimulus.

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Four tax tips for landlords

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Paying tax is an annual and stressful chore for landlords whether it’s stamp duty or income, capital gains or corporation tax.

By revealing some simple tax tips, we hope to help landlords remain stress-free and as safe as possible from paying too much tax and losing valuable spare time.

Our financial chief and property tax expert, Shahbaz Husain, provides five tips to help ensure you stay on top of your taxes.

Expenses claims

Every journey starts somewhere and this one starts with the basics of keeping correct and complete records.

If your records are in disarray, you are more likely to miss something, the most common of which are home office costs and mileage reclaims.

A property accountant can help you set up systems to ensure that you’re not missing a penny of eligible costs. It’s always good to have an extra set of eyes, especially when dealing with things as important as your income.

Limited appeal

Mortgage interest tax calculations have changed in recent years and many landlords are looking to incorporate their portfolios.

But trading through a limited company is not a panacea that will automatically lead to a lower tax bill.

Whether you benefit from this will depend upon a number of factors, including how long you plan to own each rental property, so get your accountant to work out if this is a viable option for you going forward.

Taking time to sit and assess situations properly and really weigh out their benefit for you personally is essential. Professional landlords have the most to gain here, but this can work well for smaller landlords, too.

Capital allowances

Capital allowances are a complex area of taxation that are often ignored by landlords. They aim to give tax relief for the reduction in value of certain assets. They cannot be claimed on your bog-standard buy-to-let, though there are circumstances where your property may qualify, such as HMOs and other multi-lets alongside holiday lets and other types of commercial property.

If you can claim, you could benefit from Annual Investment Allowance, writing down allowance, super-deduction or structures and buildings allowance.

Pump primed

Grants of up to £5,000 were announced in Rishi Sunak’s October Budget Statement and will become available from April 2022 for the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps.

Air source heat pumps typically cost between £6,000 and £18,000 (depending on size) and this grant forms part of the Governments strategy to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Other ways to reduce stress

Whilst not a tax tip in the strictest sense, it is important to ensure you use an accountant that specialises in property.

Ideally, this would be someone that has investment properties themselves, so that they understand the commercial aspects as well as taxation.

Knowing your way around your taxes is integral to staying on top of your property business. But it’s always useful to have a helping hand. Clooper is a huge boon to the landlord looking to cut back on wasted time and money.

Clooper’s developers have worked hard to bring helpful tools to their platform, that any landlord can use.

One is our tenant matching service. After you list your property, Clooper automatically advertises your property portfolio on other major property portals, including Zoopla, Rightmove and Prime Location.

This means that you can sit back and relax while the prospective tenants come to you, and you can choose which you contact to find your perfect match.

It can be easy to get sucked into overspending to advertise on multiple platforms, and in multiple different ways.

With Clooper this is minimised substantially, and you only pay a relatively small fixed fee to get your property professionally advertised and matched to local tenants.

Another added benefit for Clooper users is that tenants are already there on the platform. They’re there waiting for properties, which you can provide.

Instead of wasting time searching through other sites and keeping a manual track of leads for properties, Clooper keeps it all neatly in one place.

Most importantly, you’re still at the helm. You control who you connect with, how your property is described, and who exactly you’re renting to. Clooper merely makes it all that much easier, and significantly less stressful.

With everything in one place, you’re at less risk on missing out on essential information going missing, void periods extending for longer than necessary, and overspending on unnecessary costs.

Sign up for Clooper today and see first-hand how they could help you save precious time and money.

This article does not constitute financial advice. Any reader must take formal advice from a property accountant/tax specialist.

©1999 – Present | Parkmatic Publications Ltd. All rights reserved | LandlordZONE® – Four tax tips for landlords | LandlordZONE.

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Tragic consequences of ‘light’ holiday-let regulation revealed by student’s death

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A landlord and tenant have been fined for poor maintenance at a Scottish holiday cottage that led to the death of a guest.

Burghill Farms, a partnership trading as Dalhousie Estates, and Piers Le Cheminant admitted breaching gas safety regulations following the incident when student Thomas Hill was found collapsed in a bathroom heated by a portable cabinet propane gas heater.

Forfar Sheriff Court heard that on 28th October 2015, the victim was staying with his girlfriend and her family at Glenmark Cottage, Tarfside. They had rented the cottage from Le Cheminant, who in turn rented the property from Burghill Farms, which was paid 20% of the rental income he received.

Hill had taken a bath in the bathroom, which was heated by the gas heater. His girlfriend and her family became concerned when he did not appear after an hour so they forced entry when they didn’t receive a response.

The 18-year-old was found collapsed next to the bathroom door and later died. A post-mortem confirmed the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning.

Insufficient maintenance

A Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation found that both Burghill Farms and Le Cheminant did not have a suitable and sufficient system of maintenance in place for the cabinet heaters and that these were in rooms without sufficient ventilation.

However, the failings could not be proven to be causally connected to Mr Hill’s death. Burghill Farms was fined £120,000 while Le Cheminant, of Poundsgate, Newton Abbot, was fined £2,000.

Hill’s father told the BBC outside the court that his son’s death had been ‘totally avoidable’.

Unlike the PRS where landlords are tightly bound by gas safety rules, holiday cottages are still largely unregulated.

HSE principal inspector Niall Miller says: “Landlords have a duty to maintain gas heaters in a safe condition, which in the context of movable gas appliances includes maintaining an appropriate operating environment.”

Calls for greater regulation of holidays lets have been growing as many private landlords in holiday hotspots have switched from long-term to short-lets.

©1999 – Present | Parkmatic Publications Ltd. All rights reserved | LandlordZONE® – Tragic consequences of ‘light’ holiday-let regulation revealed by student’s death | LandlordZONE.

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Rent-to-rent tenants face ‘scandalous’ Universal Credit clawback, it is reported

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Sub-letting tenants who started receiving Universal Credit during the pandemic are fighting repayment requests from the Department of Work and Pensions.

A national newspaper has reported that they have been wrongly told they must pay back more than £5,000 of benefits awarded at the start of the pandemic after the DWP began retrospectively reassessing claims and decided that many with rent-to-rent arrangements weren’t entitled to the benefit. Housing charities have warned that a swathe of claimants are likely to face incorrect penalties.

The number of private renters claiming Universal Credit soared from 749,000 to 1,549,000 between March 2020 and February 2021, as certain vetting procedures were suspended due to Covid. 

The i newspaper reports that Mick Vokes, 48, from Eastleigh in Hampshire was told to repay £5,300 in housing benefit approved at the start of the pandemic for his £600-a-month rent, as the DWP said he was not eligible because he did not have a tenancy agreement for his sub-let property.

Tenancy agreement

Vokes said: “If I had known that I needed a tenancy agreement I would have moved out and found somewhere else, but at no point did [the DWP] tell me it was necessary.”

The DWP has since apologised for the error. According to one housing expert, its policy of requiring a tenancy agreement as proof of renting has no legal basis.

A DWP spokesperson said: “At the onset of the pandemic we rightly suspended certain verification processes as we could no longer see customers face-to-face. However, we made customers aware that we may return to seek this verification in the future, which we have done in these cases.”

Bill Irvine at Universal Credit Advice tells LandlordZONE that with Universal Credit, any overpayment is potentially recoverable but that the DWP could have asked landlords to provide validation.

“It’s one thing if someone has provided a false tenancy agreement and misrepresented themselves, however, with these cases it’s not a proper revision and the DWP don’t have the right to cancel a claim – asking people to repay money is scandalous,” he says.

Read more about Universal Credit.

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Asylum seeker HMO operator fined £60,000 for running house without licence

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A company that houses asylum seekers has been fined more than £60,000 for HMO offences in Newport.

Clearsprings Ready Homes, which has the contract for operating accommodation for asylum seekers in Wales, was found guilty of letting an HMO in Redland Street (pictured), in the Brynglas area of the city, without a licence.

The firm, which has a registered business address in Rayleigh, Essex, was found to have failed to comply with the requirements of a housing notice when it didn’t produce requested documents without a reasonable excuse.

The company also failed to comply with management regulations; Newport Magistrates Court heard that it had not ensured firefighting equipment and fire alarms were maintained in good working order. It received fines totalling £60,586 and must pay up by 26^th November.

Mixed portfolio

Clearsprings Ready Homes has a mixed portfolio of 1,500 owned and leased properties across the UK, from large HMOs and hostel style accommodation to small studio apartments. It is registered as having six other HMOs in the Newport area.

The company offers landlords a fully-managed service with long-term lets, guaranteeing no void periods, fixed monthly rental payments at current market rates and a full repairs and maintenance service for occupant damage.

Its website says: “We are a business that prides itself on providing value for money, quality and transparency in a package that meets the needs of our customers whilst complying with the stringent standards demanded by our contracts and local authority legislation.”

The firm declined to comment on the ruling.

Read more: Ignorance of rules won’t stop huge fines warns judge.

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LATEST: Key report into effectiveness of landlord regulation due next month

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A key report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into private rental market regulation is due to be published next month, LandlordZONE has been told.

The NAO, which is tasked with measuring all governments’ effectiveness, wants to know whether the existing laws and regulations covering landlords – which currently total some 200 – support the government’s aim of ‘making renting fairer for renters’.

Its ‘Regulation of Private Renting’ study will examine three key areas of the recently-renamed housing ministry’s activity within the sector.

Now called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the NAO wants to report on whether it has a clear strategy to meet its aims and whether it understands the problems facing private tenants.

It also wants to know if DLUHC has enough powers to incentivise and support landlords to treat tenants fairly and comply with regulations.

Lastly, the report will tackle the extent to ‘which consumers are empowered to enforce their rights when things go wrong, and whether regulatory interventions are targeted at those in most need’.

Financial issues

The NAO says that, although most renters in the private rented sector have a good experience, ‘those who do not can end up with serious illnesses, financial issues or homelessness’.

It is understood that the NAO is aiming to publish the report during December but warns timings are always subject to change.

It is widely believed that the delay of the government White Paper on renting reform, which was also due next month, was delayed until next year partly to give time for the NAO’s report to be taken on board by Ministers once it is published.

Pic credit: TP Bennett

©1999 – Present | Parkmatic Publications Ltd. All rights reserved | LandlordZONE® – LATEST: Key report into effectiveness of landlord regulation due next month | LandlordZONE.

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To throw or not to throw?

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Nightmare tenant evicted and finally gone last week. She’s tried every legal trick in the book to get the council to re-house her (she moved into the small house with her partner and very quickly produced three children) and is playing every single legal card she can try to get the council to re-house her in a three bed property.

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