Compliance When Finding Tenants - After the Renters’ Rights Bill

The Renters’ Rights Bill has completed the Committee Stage and we are now awaiting dates for the Report Stage and 3rd Reading.  It is now looking less likely to receive the predicted timescale for Royal Assent before the summer recess, although nothing is certain.  This would however give landlords a further few weeks of breathing space to get their head around, and prepare for, the upcoming changes.

Finding suitable tenants in the new landscape when the Act becomes law will be of high importance, particularly with the abolition of Section 21 making it more difficult to evict.

How to choose your tenants

We recently attended a seminar hosted by Tessa Shepperson of Landlord Law and some helpful tips are shared below:

• Ensure you meet your prospective tenant(s) in person before agreeing to any let

• Get thorough checks done including credit checks and references.  Be vigilant to look out for any negative indications or conflicts and duly follow up on these

• The RRB will prohibit discrimination against applicants on benefits or who have children so when advertising your property you should never state ‘no DSS applicants’ or ‘no children’.  The only caveat could be that the property isn’t suitable for children, but you would need to have concrete evidence to back this up.  It would always be worth double checking with your agent or landlord association if you felt there was genuine reason for refusal of these applicants within your advertising

• The advice is to be cautious around giving or recording reasons for your choice of one application over the other, so be more mindful in your reasons for rejecting a tenant - these could legitimately include such considerations as:

  • clear affordability issues

  • you as landlord feel that, after assessing several tenants, your preference lay with one tenant/s in particular

  • negative references were received

• There will be a change to how advanced payments are taken and landlords can only take the deposit and holding deposit before the tenancy agreement is signed

• Landlords will not be able to charge more than the advertised rent and bidding wars are not permissible

• Guarantors will remain but will not be liable for unpaid rent after the death of a close family member

In the future tenants will be able to apply to the Ombudsman if they think they have been discriminated against or unreasonably refused the right to keep a pet.  Remember that some of the protected characteristics around discrimination are age, being or becoming a transsexual person, being married or in a civil partnership, being pregnant or on maternity leave, race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion, sex or sexual orientation.

Remember your requirements

The rules and obligations are there already for landlords and we have previously blogged on the need to Professionalise Your Portfolio.  Landlords must ensure that they, and their property, comply with all the rules that will be in force. 

Obligations such as:

• Ensuring you have all the relevant and valid certifications in place (ie Gas Safety, EICR, EPC etc)

• The property should be in good and habitable condition, free from mould and damp, with running hot water and suitable heating

• Landlords must ensure they are registered with the ICO

• Landlords will need to be a  member of the Redress Scheme

• Landlords will also need to ensure they and their property is registered with the new Property Database/Portal along with uploading all the relevant information

Further details on Redress Scheme and Database will emerge once we progress further through the stages of the Bill.

In many ways landlords already practice this when securing their tenants - finding suitable matches to your properties is what drives successful tenancies.  So there will be no real change in procedure other than extra caution and compliance knowledge which we will continue to help with.