Nightmare tenants

There’s nothing worse for landlords than nightmare tenants. From late rent payments, to damaged property, irresponsible tenants are not only infuriating and stressful but they can leave you seriously out of pocket.

It’s not always easy to spot a bad tenant when you’re going through the letting process, regardless of how good their references are or how nice they seem when you’re vetting them.

So what are the tell-tale signs of a not-so ‘model’ tenant? And if you do end up with a problem tenant then what can you do to protect yourself from loss of income and your property from damage?

Student lets

As students start heading back to Uni after the summer holidays, thousands of landlords around the nation will be getting set to welcome these youngsters into their properties and for those less experienced at renting out their property to students – there will no doubt be a few nerves amongst them.

The perception of students as tenants is not always positive with many landlords worried that this will leave their property in ruins, with messy students running amok and partying every night with little regard for their property. Student renters do pose other issues for landlords too, such as the fact that their leases are often shorter term and their properties tend to remain empty over holiday periods.

So how can you find the best student tenants? What ground rules need to be put in place from the start? How can you make sure your property is in good shape when they leave? And how do you make sure you have the right insurance in place?

Guests

For the answers to these questions and any more, Paul Shamplina from Landlord Action, Simon Thompson from Accommodation for Students and Eddie Hooker from Total Landlord Insurance joined us to provide advice on these issues and answer questions from the live online audience. The show also features James Davis, CEO of Upad offering advice on how to choose the right tenant. Watch the on demand  version of the show now to find out more.

For more information: www.totallandlordinsurance.co.uk

Host: Kevin Harris (KH)

Guests:   Paul Shamplina, Landlord Action (PS); Eddie Hooker, Total Landlord Insurance (EH); Simon Thompson, Accommodation for Students (ST); Vanessa Warwick, Property Tribes (VW)

As the Experts segment: James Davis, CEO Upad (JD)

KH: Hello I’m Kevin Harris and welcome to our live show. Joining me here today we have Paul Shamplina from Landlord Action and Eddie Hooker from Total Landlord Insurance. And joining us later on as well will be Simon Thompson from Accommodation for students and Vanessa Warwick from Property Tribes will be here bringing you the latest property tweets of the week. Gents thanks for joining us first up and thanks to you for joining us wherever you are as well. Don’t forget of course that if you’ve not seen the show before let me quickly remind you how things are going to work today. First up then our experts will offer their top tips on how to deal with nightmare tenants. We’ll prepare you with everything that you need to know about letting your property out to students. We’ll also be hearing advice from an expert on finding the right tenant. And there’ll be those tweets of the week and of course we’ll be answering all of your questions live and don’t forget if you do have any questions we would love to hear from you. Just use the box that’s on your screen right now or of course you can get in touch via Twitter. And if you do please just add a hashtag to your tweet and that hashtag is #letyourpropertytv and we’ll do our best to give you a mention. So Paul, Eddie, thanks for joining us. Paul we’ll start with you perhaps first. Nightmare tenants – they must be a landlord’s kind of no-go. What sort of problems can they bring for a landlord?

PS: They can bring a lot of problems. At the moment there was a recent survey came out that over 100,000 tenants in this country are more than two months in rent arrears.  

KH: That’s incredible

PS: It is incredible and as this buy to let boom in the last ten years has expanded we’re now at 16.6% predicted to go in the year 2020 to 23% there’s going to be more bad tenants. There’s more landlord coming to the market, there’s a lack obviously of building out there. There’s job losses, there’s a whole stream of reasons why there’s problem tenants and it’s about if you do have a problem tenant how do you react and how do you deal with it quickly?

KH: Yeah and I suppose before you get to that point though could you flag up a troublesome tenant early on before you take them on.

PS: Well I can, kind of. That’s dealing with over 23,000 instructions in the last 12 years. Obviously it’s down to the referencing which is paramount but we’re running hundreds of cases at a time and each case is different and every landlord and agent are different. The problem that you have is that you have a landlord that may be worrying about voids and sticking a tenant in a property as quickly as possible, worrying about the mortgage being paid, their accidental landlords and it’s like  anything, if you sign a credit agreement to buy a sofa, you’re going to be credit checked. It’s exactly the same when you’re given a 30days credit with a tenancy agreement, it’s an advance. You’ve got to carry out your checking. If you don’t do that then get a professional who does it for you.

EH: I think it is in experience as well buy a lot of landlord because the accidental landlord boom is rising as well.

KH: And when you say accidental landlord, you mean somebody who’s got a bit of spare cash, they think “I’ll downsize and use that money for another property”.

EH: Yeah, or who has been left a property

PS: Or even people who bought in the 2003 2004 2005 era that were looking to buy a property flip it not really interested in being a landlord and then they ended up being stuck with a property. But being a landlord is a good business let’s face it. I know there was a recent survey done about seven or eight months ago by Halifax of which 3,000 tenants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to be homeowners. 95% of them said they couldn’t afford the deposit. So we’ve now got another generation of renters exactly like we have in Europe in terms of Germany and France.

KH: Yeah in France for example most people rent rather than buy don’t they. So what can we do? The accidental landlord or indeed landlord in general what can they do not only to protect perhaps the physical aspects of their property but also against loss of income if people are 2 months in arrears that’s two months where they’ve got to cover the mortgage themselves.

PS: They’ve got to be geared up and think worst case scenario. We tell it how it is – landlord action are like landlord Samaritans. What we say is it could be worst case scenario, you could have your tenant in the property for five months. So as soon as there’s two months’ rent arrears your section 8 your rent arrears notice then you’re going to court, you’ll arrange to get your bailiffs in. So it’s being able to cope with those financial losses, paying the mortgage and paying your legal fees and being geared up. I would say last year was the biggest amount of landlords that I know of in our history of having their properties repossessed. At the same time we’re trying to evict their tenants. And they’re the accidental landlords that don’t have a B plan.

EH: And also I think, a lot of landlords don’t know what to do. When they end up with a problem, they either bury their heads in the sand or they try to negotiate with their tenant.

PS: And tenants will pull the wool over their eyes. We had one landlord that called us about 5 months ago, thirteen months’ rent arrears, overseas landlord, didn’t have a proper managing agent. And of course another preventative action is obviously taking insurance which is rental guarantee insurance.

KH: Of course. What can you do to protect yourself financially?

EH: Well you can buy rent guarantee insurance, a policy which will provide protection if the tenant stops paying their rent. There’s terms and conditions like with all insurance policies, so I always suggest make sure you read the small print, know what you’re buying. But you can pick up these sorts of policies for round about £100 per year and that will provide you up to £25,000 of loss of rent. The problem being with this type of policy is that you have to follow the protocols. So as Paul says if you get into one month’s rent or two month’s rent arrears you have to write letters and the insurance company like taking that over.

KH: You’ve got to show the insurance company that you’ve been doing something along the way

 EH: Yeah or you need to talk to your insurers and they take it over for you

PS: We have that because we act for insurance companies as well, but we find that there’s a lot of landlords that are able to carry out the procedures themselves and are able to do that but there’s a lot of landlords that just don’t have a clue. The advice that I do when I do talks all over the country is as soon as there’s one month and one day in arrears which effectively is 2 months’ rent arrears you should be serving that notice. In that mean time you should be communicating, you should be sending your letters you should be getting that gut feeling as to whether you’re telling them, I always say give your tenant a chance and if they’re not given that chance or they are burying their head in the sand like Eddie said then you have to take a commercial view because this game is a commercial business.

KH: Yeah absolutely and they must like you mention your overseas guy with 13 months’ rent arrears, he should’ve done something much much sooner

PS: He didn’t check his bank statements

KH: Well exactly, that’s kind of incredible, maybe he’s got so much money it doesn’t matter

EH: I think deposits are very very important, so take at least one month’s deposit from your tenant because if they do fall into rent arrears as Paul says for maybe one or two months at least you’ve covered some of that and tenant referencing as well so make sure that you know who the tenant is and you’re doing the checks on them

KH: Get more than one reference presumably

PS: It’s time, so if you don’t have the time you get a proper qualified accredited referencing company or I would say get three months bank statements, you can see what day of the month the tenant gets paid, how much they get paid what are their other x’s I mean a bank statement tells you everything. If a tenant will generally turn round and say to you I’m not giving you that bank statement then what are they hiding? That’s normally an indication, then you’ve got employers reference, you’ll see whether, if you have their bank statements if their wage is going in, if they’re working for marks and spencer’s is a direct debit going in. Previous landlord’s reference which we’re finding is a big problem because we actually have tenants which are in rent arrears with a previous landlord and they say they are a good tenant and pass the problem on. And we’re seeing a huge rise in that kind of thing.

EH: What about cash, Paul? If a tenant says to you I’ll pay you by cash that would be alarm bells wouldn’t it?

PS: Yes and no I mean generally we’ve seen a lot of that with regard to cannabis factories, dare I say it it’s a growing industry, excuse the pun but we are seeing a lot of landlords that are really worried and there should be a procedure that you follow with regard to referencing and if you’re taking away some of that referencing procedure and they’re saying we’ll give you six months’ rent in advance, we’re going to give you a bank statement, you know there’s a lot of ID theft out there and then obviously the tell-tale signs with the cannabis factory is that no one’s living there, the windows are all blacked out, the letterbox is sealed and there’s big claims

EH: Big claims

KH: There must be a point though when you just think to yourself well hold it look I’ve gone through the process, I’m in rent arrears, it’s unresolved, I need them out, I’ve got to evict them

PS: Well you do and that’s when you serve your notice

KH: And when you get to that point what do you do?

PS: Well, when there’s two months’ rent arrears, in that mean time you’ve tried you chase, you’ve given your tenant a chance, you serve your notice and then you have to apply to issue court proceedings which will take you 6-8 weeks to go before the judge. If you’re successful which is what you want to be you’ll get a 14 day possession order, you’ll get a money order, you’ll get some costs and after that if the tenant still doesn’t leave and is still obstinate then you’ve got to get the bailiffs in to do the eviction. Now bailiffs are busier than ever as you can imagine, they’re in house repossessions, they’re doing landlord tenant evictions, they’re trying to collect debts. The whole process from start to finish can be 4 or 5 months depending on the court you’re at.

EH: And you’ve still got to pay the mortgage

PS: And you’ve still got to pay the mortgage and your legal fees and you’re maintenance charges and then really you have to say to yourself and I say this to all my landlords to take a commercial view, is that tenant worth pursuing? If they’re on housing benefit, you open the door after your eviction and there’s a mound of post, everyone’s chasing your tenant, you’ve got no chance. I’d rather you spend your £500 or £600 for debt recovery procedure employing a maintenance guy, getting the property up to lettable state and try and reclaim and learn by your mistakes. Every landlord will make a mistake

KH: Well, hold that thought because actually I think we’re going to have a look now at yourself in action Paul on an eviction that you took part in recently. Have a look at this.

(video 10.00)

PS: This place is being sold by all accounts, so it’s important that we get full possession of it, there’s only 2 tenants left, we’re doing the eviction of one of the tenants today and we’re waiting for the bailiffs in about 10minutes. Most of the time you’ll open the door, there’s no one there, we have to change the locks, and then there’s a whole pile of post on the floor, and then you’ll open the fridge and there’s some stale milk and you’ll know they’ve only been 2 3 days beforehand they’ve packed up, most of the time. But you do have the occasional tenant like today where they’re still in the property.  The tenant’s now gone, good as gold no problem at all, he’s ok, he’s very calm, he’s actually eating a kebab from last night for breakfast so I don’t think that’ll taste that nice so the police came just to make sure they were there to oversee everything, they were here for one sec and then went off, the bailiffs have gone to do another job. Once Gareth puts that shutter up and secures it, we’ve got one more to go, you know it’s a little bit relentless. By the year 2020 we’re looking at 22/23% of the housing market is going to be private rental sector. At the moment it’s 15%. I can tell you now that the last quarter, there was over 100,000 tenants in more than 2 months rent arrears so we are going to get busier, there is more landlords out there, there’s more bad tenants, but people can’t buy properties you know they’re struggling to buy.

KH: There you go, interesting stuff, you remember that one Paul?

PS: I do actually

KH: One you’d rather forget?

PS: No well dare I say I tend to do it more for the cameras now, I mean I used to but I’ve seen some very classical works of art left on people’s walls

KH: Yeah I can imagine and I was just going to say Eddie malicious damage must a landlord’s worst nightmare but I think total insurance have got some stats on that recently

EH: Well we’ve done quite a few surveys over the past few months, especially with regard to frequencies and values of claims and malicious damage is right up there in terms of not only the cost of it but the aggravation of it. Our advice is make sure that you’ve got an insurance policy that actually covers malicious damage because most of them don’t cover malicious damage.

PS: We had one landlord in Scotland that we assisted many moons ago, he had a cannabis factory and it cost him in the tune of about £12 / 13,000 and it puts landlords off being landlords, you know it’s a massive hit.

KH: And that could potentially be your mortgage payments for the whole  year.

EH: Exactly, have a look again at the small print of the policy because many policies will not cover malicious damage whilst the property is unoccupied for a certain amount of time. And we’ll talk about it later with student lets and you end up with maybe 2 or 3 months of the year that the property is unoccupied because the student’s gone back home. That’s when malicious damage happens, the property’s empty, in go the opportunists.

PS: The landlord’s not done enough to secure that property

KH: Alright chaps well we’ll leave it there for a moment, Paul actually we’ll say goodbye to you, thanks for your input, Eddie you’re staying right where you are. We’re moving on now, and it’s time for our ask the experts feature and we’ve grabbed some time with James Davis from Upad and asked for his advice on how to find a good tenant and here’s what he had to say.

(video 13.29)

JD: Before taking on a tenant I think it’s very important you do your due diligence on them and who they are as a person. I’m a self-managing landlord which means that I do all the viewings myself I manage the property throughout the course of the tenancy agreement. And I think the first thing to do, and what I recommend landlords do is to do the viewings themselves, the gut feeling of meeting somebody, it’s very hard to put your finger on it, but I think it’s imperative that you do that, sort of looking somebody in the eye says a huge amount about who they actually are. You can ask them questions like “when do you want to move into the property?” if they say “oh next week’s ok, well have they actually given notice to their existing landlord for example because they’ve got to give notice. What that will flag up in your mind is whether they’re going to do a runner from you in 11 months’ time for example without giving you the correct notices. Anecdotally, many things I’ve heard from colleagues of mine is what car do they turn up in? is it full of crisp packets and rubbish in the car? Because it’s probably an indication that your property in 12 months’ time would look in a similar sort of state. And the other thing that’s worth mentioning is you might want to go 2 landlords back for a reference because if you had a problem tenant and you were asked for a reference you’d probably give a shining example of how great they’ve been because you want them out of your property as quickly as you can. To overcome that you may want to go two back to completely protect yourselves. But at the end of the day for a majority of landlords, owning a buy-to-let or a portfolio of properties as your pension fund, it’d be very easy just to take the first person that comes along without doing your checks and end up with a tenant in arrears for 6 months, potentially damaging the property and you having to sort that mess out with the costs and the effort associated with it. A lot of that pain can be alleviated by physically meeting a tenant and also fully referencing them. There’s a lot of other tips which we’ve got on our blog which is at upad.co.uk and on there is a lot of advice and top tips about how you can maximise yields, minimise voids and ensure you’re getting the best possible tenants along. But I think those in a nutshell are my sort of key takeaways that I think would be good for landlords to know.

KH: So welcome back and I’m pleased to say that we are now joined here by Simon Thompson from Accommodation for Students and Vanessa white from Property Tribes who will be bringing us our tweets from the week shortly. Thanks for coming in by the way guys, we were all just having a little watch from James there from Upad and I think Simon was quite interested in that one.

ST: It was quite entertaining when he mentioned about the crisp packets – one thing about students is that you’re pretty much guaranteed to find crisp packets in their cars.

KH: Exactly. Letting to students is obviously your specialty here - very different to letting to any sort of professionals. That’s right, there aren’t too many key differences

KH: Not that there’s anything wrong with students I might add

ST: Absolutely, important to make note. There aren’t too many differences as such but obviously students you’ve got a 40 week tenancy as a minimum tenancy term and students do generally rent in houses of multiple occupation as well so generally you’ve got more tenants than you have with a professional.

KH: Yeah I remember once sharing a house down in Plymouth with I think 7 of us and we had one bathroom. It was awful, absolutely awful. And you’ve got issues as well I suppose with parents being guarantors and things like that as well

ST: That’s right yeah with referencing and stuff it can be difficult because you don’t actually reference the tenant it’s the parent who’s referenced as the guarantor.

KH: And you’ve obviously got that issue you mentioned there of a 40 week tenancy. I remember from my uni days you didn’t want to pay for the thing while you’re not in it for Summer or the holidays so do you take a hit on that or how do you manage that?

ST: It’s quite interesting actually because students attitudes change the longer they spend at university so you’ll find that the first year students generally start looking for accommodation earlier and then the 4th year final year students will potentially be thinking about going to Ibiza for the Summer and saving the money for the Summer term.

KH: Yeah interesting stuff, we’ve just had a question come in while you were chatting there, it comes from propertypriceadvice.co.uk so thanks for that: How can a landlord renting to students make the most of their property during university holidays which can sometimes be several months long. So I suppose the question there is could you let it to somebody else or do something with it? What would you do?

ST: Obviously the landlord can do with his property what he/her wishes providing its not under the agreement with the tenant as such. I really recommend to landlords that that’s the time you really look at your property look at the maintenance of your property, make sure the hedges are trimmed because at the end of the day that’s what’s going to make it most attractive to new potential tenants that’ll think about renting your property.

KH: And I suppose it’s fair to say as well that students could be great tenants as well, there’s nothing that says you shouldn’t rent to students because they’re all layabouts who eat crisps.

ST: Exactly, the stereotypical view of the student of being like the Young Ones is quite funny because most students now don’t know who the Young Ones are. Times really have changed and students now because of the rise in tuition fees, now £9,000 is a tough time for students at the moment. They’re really thinking carefully about where they’re going to go to university, picking the right universities and the right courses and they’re thinking very much about what they’re going to get at the end of it vocationally so they’re really not at university to mess around and its interesting because students actually spend more time in the properties now as well

KH: What rather than going out to pubs, bars they’re kind of staying in?

ST: Yeah

KH: It’s quite interesting because I remember when I was at university certainly all of my mates would come from all over the country but I think now perhaps people go to universities nearer to home for the reason perhaps of accommodation costs, I don’t know.

ST: Yeah it can vary, obviously with the choice of university that’s the most important factor so students are tending to still travel quite a bit but obviously cost of accommodation is a very important key factor. On our website accommodationforstudents.com we’ve got a rental table that helps landlords to decide where to buy student properties etc.

KH: Right OK, and we were chatting before about referencing, how do you find the best student tenants? When should you start looking for them I suppose?

ST: I think the key important thing in terms of finding the right tenants is basically meet as many as possible. That’s the best way of doing it, don’t just show potential tenants round the property and say “do you want it” type thing. Landlords really can afford to be quite choosy in terms of who they have to their properties. We’ve just had put up a calendar system on the website where landlords can basically say “I’ve got an open viewing on Saturday” and then students can at the click of a button register interest, turn up within that one hour period and then the landlord can then take his pick essentially from the tenants.

EH: It’s a slightly different mind-set as well being a student landlord because for most of the students it’s their first time away from home so they don’t have mum and dad picking up after them, they’re not going to know how the washing machine works, they don’t know how to change a lightbulb so I think if you’re letting to students don’t expect your property necessarily to be returned in the pristine condition it was when you let it. Make sure you get a proper AST agreement, a tenancy agreement and as Simon said meet them and go through what their obligations are. You’re not going to get a student out of bed to mow the lawn. So if that’s what you want them to do, make sure that you tell them that’s what you want

KH: Or probably factor in the cost of paying a handyman to pop round once a month and do a few odd jobs

EH: Exactly, and finally check, a lot of insurers will not accept student tenants for some strange reason so..

KH: Yeah differences with insurance companies we mentioned some earlier

EH: Exactly so make sure when you’re buying your insurance if you are letting to students make sure that you tell the insurance company or but a policy that doesn’t differentiate between the different tenant types.

KH: Good stuff, good advice, now we’ve had some questions come in here thanks to Helen Nathalin, she says “how can you allow students to decorate their bedrooms without blue or white tack marks or worse defacing the walls without the need for regular repainting. Cork boards can only do so much.

EH: They are going to put up timetables aren’t they?

EH: I remember that as a student, no posters on the walls you can’t do this you can’t do that but I mean you’ve got to allow people to live in the property haven’t you really?

ST: That’s right, general wear and tear as well within the property is to be expected with students. If you don’t want that, rent to professionals is probably my advice. But we recently did a focus group with a lot of students around the UK and we asked them what their ideal accommodation would be and very much at the top of the list was making sure that you’ve got pin boards within the rooms, places where they can put things up so if you don’t want that, maybe that’s an option.

KH: Yeah sure, and specifically as well if you are going to be letting decisions, we mentioned briefly different kinds of insurance. Are there any other sort of checks or anything else as a landlord that you need to think about when you’re letting to students?

EH: Deposits – make sure that you take a deposit and that if you do take a deposit that you actually protect it with a tenancy deposit protection scheme and the other type of insurance which is making quite a headway into the market is what’s called home emergency insurance. Now that’s particularly useful if you are a landlord who has purchased a property miles away from where you actually live and as I mentioned earlier, students are going to struggle with how to they turn the stop clock off or if they’ve got a broken window you don’t want to be driving up and down the motorway so repair these sorts of things so you can buy into a policy where you give the phone number to the tenant and then they will ring the tradesman directly and they will deal with those issues and its 24/7 so its stops you getting the phone call at 3 o clock in the morning – “I’ve locked myself out, what do I do?”

KH: Go and stay with a mate. Right on that note we’ll move on, it’s time now then to look at your property tweets of the week and I think Vanessa’s going to help us with this one. So Vanessa thanks very much for sitting very quietly throughout all of that, you’re here now to do your slot.

VW: It’s all interesting stuff, I’m learning something.

KH: I think today’s tweet of the week is to do with universal credit I think we can see there on the screen. What’s this one about then here it is you can see it on the screen now.

VW: Well universal credit is very much on the minds of landlords at the moment, a lot of action on Twitter, I think we’ve got about 5 different discussions on universal credit happening on propertytribes.com. It’s starting to be implemented from April 2013 and basically it’s of concern to landlords because benefits will be paid to the recipient in a lump sum and then it will be up to the benefit recipient to distribute those payments around. I think a lot of landlords are quite fearful that the tenant is going to get this large lump of cash and is not going to pass on the rental payment and there’s always fear of the unknown and it’s not particularly clear about how it’s going to be administered and how exactly it’s going to work and I think that’s where the fear factor is coming in for landlords but we have heard from government that they are going to employ “common sense” and hopefully there will be direct payments to landlords, certainly for tenants in arrears if nothing else. But definitely things are changing, benefit caps are coming in as well and the whole landscape of renting to LHA tenants is changing and some landlords may feel that they don’t want to remain in that marketplace and move on to private tenants

KH: So the system that has been in place prior to this coming in, how long has that been in place for, quite some time?

VW: Indeed yes, it changes with different governments and so on but one factor was that if a tenant went into arrears we could have the benefit, the rent paid direct to us as landlords and that gave a feeling of comfort as a landlord.

KH: What do you think on this one Eddie?

EH: Well I think listening to the whole show today not just on universal credit I think it shows that being a landlord now is not as easy as it once was. There seems to be so much legislation coming in and changing things and obviously universal credit is going to have a massive impact to many landlords and if you’ve not read up on how it works you could obviously get quite stung for quite a severe amount of money. So my advice to would be landlords out there is read up on your obligations and keep abreast of the legislation as it seems to be changing almost monthly now.

VW: Indeed, indeed and I think many landlords say well I’m not going to rent to LHA tenants I’m just going to focus on private tenants but a private tenant is only one redundancy away from becoming an LHA tenant and I’ve actually had that experience recently where I’ve had an extremely good tenant in a very good job who was made redundant very suddenly with no warning and they’ve had to go onto benefits and now I’ve got an LHA tenant. So I think it’s very important to understand as Eddy said how the legislation is going to affect you even if you think you’re not going to end up ever with an LHA tenant because in this marketplace you just don’t know.

KH: Great stuff well thanks ever so much for that. We’re nearly out of time but we’ve had another question come in so Phil we’ll get to your question. What are the rules in regards to throwing students out if the neighbours complain? Is it possible to have a one strike and you’re out policy if the complaint is sufficiently bad?

ST: Interesting question. I think the legal side of it is that the answer is no. from that perspective I think again it all comes down to what we were discussing beforehand. It’s about choosing the right tenants for your property and if you are in doubt with the tenant, don’t take them on in the first instance. But when these situations arise obviously within sure hold tenancy agreements normally you have stipulations on the number of people who can occupy a property and what I would say is where you can, put things into agreements and then follow it up in the right way

EH: Like I said earlier you’ve got to have a slightly different mind-set – they’re going to have parties and there’s going to be a bit of noise and I think a lot of it is about communication. You can’t just turn up at a property as a landlord and demand because it’s your property that you’re just going to barge in. You’ve got to give notice but I do recommend that you are at least inspecting the property on a semi regular basis and you’re in a communication with the tenant.

KH: It’s got to be a 2 way street

VW: Probably worth noting as well that many councils have a noise officer. If you complain to the council, this person’s on call 24/7 and if there’s a very loud party going on you can call the council and this noise abuse guy will come out and he will issue them a formal warning and he will also contact the letting agent to let them know that the tenant has caused a problem.

EH: Last resort, kick them out

KH: Yeah because if you’ve got good communication a good relationship before you start then hopefully you’re alright.

ST: One tip I have got for landlords is to sit down with the tenant at the start of the tenancy and discuss everything through because just as much as you’re judging the tenant, the tenant’s also judging you.  So it’s really important that you come across as being organised, you state what you’re prepared to do in terms of SLAs etc. and then also you can have the opportunity to tell the tenants what you expect from them.

KH: Good stuff. Right one last quick question because it’s just come in from Phil this time Phil Jones. It says “what happens if the student leaves the university after only a few weeks? Can I hold them to the full contract length?”

EH: Yes you can. I think if I could just expand that very quickly a common problem with student lets is that many landlords issue what’s called a jointed several tenancy agreement so that’s one tenancy agreement that covers all of the tenants that are in that property and if one of those tenants leave then a lot of students don’t understand that they are jointly reliable for the balance of the rent. So yes you can change tenants midway through but if you don’t manage to do that you need to explain to the other tenants that they’re going to be in for that rent which was being paid by the outgoing tenant.

KH: And if they know that that’ll probably get them soon filling the gap I’m sure with somebody that they know

EH: Exactly

ST: We’re finding as well that there’s individual tenancy agreements that are being produced now because students don’t like the fact that they become liable for other people in the property especially when they might not know them at the start of the term.

KH: Good stuff, well listen it’s been great, we’re at the end of our time. We’ve chatted away there for 30 minutes and we could’ve chatted for 30 more, but thanks ever so much for joining us once again. So there we go we have run out of time. Thanks go to Eddie Paul Simon and Vanessa for joining us, and of course thanks to you watching along wherever you are right now and of course if you want to find out more or indeed find out more about total landlord insurance please go to www.totallandlordinsurance.co.uk and as well if you’re on Facebook check out the Total Landlord Facebook page and give them a like and if you do that then you may win a year investment to property investing news. Best of luck with that and thanks for watching. Goodbye