In terms of my categories of blogging this probably straddles the anger management and the journal type as it outlines, briefly, the latest development in the hassle we have been receiving over the house we have been renting since February. It is astounding that we have reached the halfway mark of our 12-month contract, the pressure makes it feel like many weeks more. Anyway, I am currently on leave and was about to set off for a day in a lovely part of southern England when there was a ring at the doorbell. A late middle-aged man stood there and asked me if I was Mr _____, i.e. the landlord. I said I was the tenant, which surprised him, and in fact that the landlord was in the USA. He then outlined that the landlord was months behind in making his mortgage repayments. I do not know how I stand legally but I know in the past tenants would just be kicked out when the landlord defaulted and the house was repossessed. I am guessing that we have more rights than that these days and hopefully there are a few stages before the house is repossessed, especially as we are close to being able to move out anyway.
This bank representative asked to see my tenancy agreement. However, it takes me half a day to find any legal document I need. I cling tightly to everything that I am sent, and the more precious it is the more securely I keep it, hence my inability to locate it. As it turned out later, my housemate actually had it, so it was a good thing I did not look for it as I would never have found it among my things. In addition, I have no financial relationship with the bank and did not feel compelled to deal with this man. I sent him to the letting agent, fortunately located near to our house, as I assume he can put his hand on all the legal papers needed and anyway, that is his job, I am supposed to be on holiday.
I do not know if this is going to make our situation any easier or harder. I can see now why the landlord was unwilling to come out with any financial incentive for us to leave the property early, but I cannot understand why he simply did not sell the property before he left the UK. Our rent is £1000 (€1480, US$2003) per month (out of this he pays only 7% fees rather than the usual 13-16% because of the agent he uses) and his mortgage payments are £1400 (€2072; US$2842), I guessed he made up the gap from the extra pay he got from his promotion in his work and the posting to the USA which presumably came with relocation funds. It was certainly wrong for him to go ahead and rent out the house defaulting on the mortgage payments; luring us into a property that he did not intend to keep for the duration of our contracted tenancy and, in turn, exposing us to his father and his slimy ways of doing 'business'. Even more than before I feel as a tenant I have no protection, I am just a cash cow that can be slaughtered the moment it is convenient for the landlord.
Gordon Brown says he is going to do more for those who are first-time buyers, but he also needs to help secure the position of those millions of us who rent. We have far fewer rights than people the other side of the English Channel. It must come as a shock for those people coming from France and Poland to work here to find they can be exploited in this way within the EU. So, this is the anger management element as tonight I feel I have absolutely no control over a central part of my life and my future - where I live.
Showing posts with label tenants rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tenants rights. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 August 2007
Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Property in the UK 5: Caught in the Crossfire
I never intended this blog to simply be about houses, I expected a mix of politics and some personal observations, favourite films and books and things. However, I suppose the political and the personal are coming together in the latest instalment of my housing woes. Every time I encounter a problem, I think it must be tough for me, but there must be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of UK citizens who are suffering this and worse and have less cash and family support to ameliorate it. I am solidly middle class, I earn 50% above the national average salary and yet I am being kicked around as if I was some homeless person. I am grateful that I am not homeless, but, maybe though, you will say I should not expect my comparative wealth to protect me from the harshness of people and the marketplace. This was the mistake the middle class made in the 1920s and so when all their money disappeared in the Depression they resorted to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, etc.
As I have noted before, when you feel powerless you turn to despair or anger and this week it has been anger. With my car having broken down last week I was fortunate to get a lift from my boss who lives about 10 miles away to where I was working, about 46 miles away. I could have gone by train but in the rush hour it would have literally cost me as much as how much I spend for the family on groceries each week. Whilst in my bosses' car, as I have outlined in 'Property in the UK 4', I was telephoned by my landlord's lawyer father telling me the house we have been renting for three-and-a-half months is now going on the market. As landlords now have to pay council tax on empty properties they keep tenants in them until the week they sell the property and it seems clear now that it was the landlord's intention to sell the house as soon as he could. So we have to deal with people walking through our house looking at us as if we are zoo animals and for no personal benefit for us. We will effectively be sold on as part of the fittings of the house. The sale will likely to be quick, fortunately, it will probably go straight to another landlord. However, we have no guarantee that we will be allowed to stay because with 2 months' notice we can be kicked out (we can leave with 1 month's notice).
Now to complicate matters the letting agency who are supposed to run the house on behalf of the landlord rang to say that we did not have allow people to view the house and in fact our contract is one of these unbreakable leases (these are increasingly common in the UK and mean you are liable for 6 or 12 months rent even if you give notice and move out after one week). He wants us to refuse to let people see the house. It seems clear that the agency and landlord have fallen out. The agency are angry they are not sole estate agent on the property as selling it would earn them £5000 (€7,300; U$10,000) compared to £840 (€1225; US$ 1680) if they continue renting it (they only charge their landlords a 7% fee rather than the 13-16% which is usual among UK letting agencies), so being a small company are seeking to deny the sale fee to a rival company. The agency say no-one will be a family house with sitting tenants anyway.
So, now we are in the crossfire. Do we go with what the landlord says and face being moved out in a couple of months (the third move in 23 months) or go with the agency and deny the landlord ability to sell the house meaning he will move to kick us out anyway? We are just a football in the argument between the two sides. No-one considers that this is our house where we have put in work keeping it clean and have lots of crops coming up in the garden. It is clear we are counted as nothing by either side, despite paying £1000 per month rent, we are just here to be disposed of as fits with the plan of the landlord or the agency. Despite my income and status I have absolutely no power over what happens to my family this year. Each time we move it costs us about £1000 and we have already paid that this year just moving four streets to this house in February. Everyone thinks about their profits and squeezing a few thousand more, what about our basic cost of living? It counts for nothing.
People keep saying to me: 'well why don't you just buy a house?' as if I had never thought of it, but with a good salary like mine struggling to afford to buy a two-bedroomed flat let alone a family house, that is just getting annoying. An increasing number of people in the UK are becoming tenants and it is clear we are just counters in some economic game, not perceived as humans trying to live a quiet life in a half-decent house. I have never started a campaign, but I feel someone should to give tenants some rights.
As I have noted before, when you feel powerless you turn to despair or anger and this week it has been anger. With my car having broken down last week I was fortunate to get a lift from my boss who lives about 10 miles away to where I was working, about 46 miles away. I could have gone by train but in the rush hour it would have literally cost me as much as how much I spend for the family on groceries each week. Whilst in my bosses' car, as I have outlined in 'Property in the UK 4', I was telephoned by my landlord's lawyer father telling me the house we have been renting for three-and-a-half months is now going on the market. As landlords now have to pay council tax on empty properties they keep tenants in them until the week they sell the property and it seems clear now that it was the landlord's intention to sell the house as soon as he could. So we have to deal with people walking through our house looking at us as if we are zoo animals and for no personal benefit for us. We will effectively be sold on as part of the fittings of the house. The sale will likely to be quick, fortunately, it will probably go straight to another landlord. However, we have no guarantee that we will be allowed to stay because with 2 months' notice we can be kicked out (we can leave with 1 month's notice).
Now to complicate matters the letting agency who are supposed to run the house on behalf of the landlord rang to say that we did not have allow people to view the house and in fact our contract is one of these unbreakable leases (these are increasingly common in the UK and mean you are liable for 6 or 12 months rent even if you give notice and move out after one week). He wants us to refuse to let people see the house. It seems clear that the agency and landlord have fallen out. The agency are angry they are not sole estate agent on the property as selling it would earn them £5000 (€7,300; U$10,000) compared to £840 (€1225; US$ 1680) if they continue renting it (they only charge their landlords a 7% fee rather than the 13-16% which is usual among UK letting agencies), so being a small company are seeking to deny the sale fee to a rival company. The agency say no-one will be a family house with sitting tenants anyway.
So, now we are in the crossfire. Do we go with what the landlord says and face being moved out in a couple of months (the third move in 23 months) or go with the agency and deny the landlord ability to sell the house meaning he will move to kick us out anyway? We are just a football in the argument between the two sides. No-one considers that this is our house where we have put in work keeping it clean and have lots of crops coming up in the garden. It is clear we are counted as nothing by either side, despite paying £1000 per month rent, we are just here to be disposed of as fits with the plan of the landlord or the agency. Despite my income and status I have absolutely no power over what happens to my family this year. Each time we move it costs us about £1000 and we have already paid that this year just moving four streets to this house in February. Everyone thinks about their profits and squeezing a few thousand more, what about our basic cost of living? It counts for nothing.
People keep saying to me: 'well why don't you just buy a house?' as if I had never thought of it, but with a good salary like mine struggling to afford to buy a two-bedroomed flat let alone a family house, that is just getting annoying. An increasing number of people in the UK are becoming tenants and it is clear we are just counters in some economic game, not perceived as humans trying to live a quiet life in a half-decent house. I have never started a campaign, but I feel someone should to give tenants some rights.
Thursday, 3 May 2007
Property in the UK 2: Take the Deposit and Run
Now, this is one issue which a few months ago would have angered me even more than it does now, so I suppose you can say I should not be disheartened as some things get better. Since leaving home in the 1980s, bar for a short period in 2001, I have been a tenant. I rented in Germany for some time in 1989, but the bulk of my experience has been in the UK. I am a clean person who treats where he is living with respect and I always spent time and money clearing and cleaning before I leave a property. However, as yet only as late as 2005 have I ever got any of my deposit back and it was not until 2007 that I actually had a whole deposit returned. Until 2007 deposits which are supposed to cover damage a tenant does to the house or flat have been treated as bonuses for the landlord. At something around £500-3000 (€730-4380; US$1000-6000) per time it was a heavy loss. It does not matter if you were renting from a letting agency or direct from the owner, they would invent the maddest excuses to hold back money: £30 for moving a microwave from the garage back into the house, when I could have done it for free if they asked; £30 for 'soap residue' left around a sink after cleaning; £45 for 'dust in the bottom of a drawer'. These are all genuine charges that I and friends have suffered. The big improvement in 2007 is that deposits now have to go into a licenced independent account and they measure the charges against an agreed itinerary. This is one of the very few things that the New Labour government has done for the British population (and visitors from abroad too). [New Labour fans, be patient, I will mention the handful of other things in coming postings.]
These made up things are not what deposits are for, they are for if you broke the front door in or burnt the carpet. NOTE: those people letting out flats can totally redecorate the house and replace all the furniture and claim it back as business expenses. NOTE: in addition to being able to get this work done tax free, they can also claim back 10% depreciation on everything from the inland revenue, so they do not need to snatch the money from your deposit.
You might think you would get a better deal from letting agents, but in my decades of renting I have only encountered 2 letting agencies that have not tried to rip me off. In general they take 13-15% of the rent that is paid, some take as little as 7% but they are desperate. To save money they tell the tenants to fix things. I was told that when a bulb went in a fixed external light it was up to me to fix. I have no electrician qualifications and was not going to hang off a ladder to unscrew and fit an expensive bulb. When the shoe was on the other foot and the oven did not function for 8 weeks and the central heating was shut down for 9 weeks because no-one had bothered to put mortar between the bricks in the flue, did I get any discount, no, of course not.
The other scam letting agents do is all the excess charges such as 'credit check' or 'arrangement fee'. I accept they have to make money, but they rake it anyway. They charges in my experience range from £120-350 (€175-510; US$240-700). They can check your credit rating in 5 minutes using a relevant company at a lot cheaper and anyway you have to provide bank and employments details, in detail. I have encountered only one letting agency in the whole of the UK that does not charge this. One company in Milton Keynes, a strange new city built in the South Midlands, and which has tens of letting agencies as it is growing so fast, admitted to me that they ran a little scam with these fees. They would show the potential tenants a house knowing that they would reject them because they were, to quote 'unclean', but still took the £200 fee, knowing they would reject the tenants. On one house they showed me they had already taken £600. The arrogance was incredible that one of the staff boasted this to me. Of course the owner of the property does not see any of this fee, they only get the 85% of the rent, so it was straight into the letting agents' pockets. Now I know not all agents do this, but it is incredible that some can and do and no-one can do anything about it.
A new trick which appeared from letting agents in the mid-2000s was fixed contracts. When I revealed what was going on to landlords/ladies even some of them were shocked and one dropped the letting agent they were using. As you know, normally, if you want to leave a house or if the owner wants the tenant to leave, they give notice of usually 1-3 months. Under the fixed contracts, it does not matter if you give 6 months notice, you still have to pay up to the end of the contract. When I left Milton Keynes I was still liable to be paying rent on that house for 4 months after I had started paying rent on a house in the new town I was moving to. In addition the agency was still free to move someone into the house I had vacated and get rent from them too. I checked this with the Citizens' Advice Bureau and apparently there is no legal comeback. Letting agents now often guarantee rent to landlords/ladies and this is the way they cover months when it might be empty. Even madder, though they might have moved other tenants into the property, I was still liable for its upkeep, mowing the lawns, cleaning windows, etc., even though I lived 120 miles (192 Km) away by then. I obviously told them where to stick their idea but then they said I was a 'bad tenant' for questioning their procedures (despite me putting up with no oven and no central heating for 8-9 weeks without protest) and they would write a bad reference for me.
Family members of friends of mine ran into real financial problems with such fixed contracts. Rent on one property takes 55% of my income and I earn 50% above the national average salary, so imagine how tough it is for people on the average or less to have to pay two rents for months. No wonder debt is such a huge problem in the UK. Bascially running a letting agency is a licence to print your own money. They expect you to do the maintenance and pay them for the pleasure of doing so. Good letting agents are extremely rare, barely competent ones are the norm and greedy, swindling ones are increasingly common. The whole sector needs much more regulation as it is hurting the ordinary people.
These made up things are not what deposits are for, they are for if you broke the front door in or burnt the carpet. NOTE: those people letting out flats can totally redecorate the house and replace all the furniture and claim it back as business expenses. NOTE: in addition to being able to get this work done tax free, they can also claim back 10% depreciation on everything from the inland revenue, so they do not need to snatch the money from your deposit.
You might think you would get a better deal from letting agents, but in my decades of renting I have only encountered 2 letting agencies that have not tried to rip me off. In general they take 13-15% of the rent that is paid, some take as little as 7% but they are desperate. To save money they tell the tenants to fix things. I was told that when a bulb went in a fixed external light it was up to me to fix. I have no electrician qualifications and was not going to hang off a ladder to unscrew and fit an expensive bulb. When the shoe was on the other foot and the oven did not function for 8 weeks and the central heating was shut down for 9 weeks because no-one had bothered to put mortar between the bricks in the flue, did I get any discount, no, of course not.
The other scam letting agents do is all the excess charges such as 'credit check' or 'arrangement fee'. I accept they have to make money, but they rake it anyway. They charges in my experience range from £120-350 (€175-510; US$240-700). They can check your credit rating in 5 minutes using a relevant company at a lot cheaper and anyway you have to provide bank and employments details, in detail. I have encountered only one letting agency in the whole of the UK that does not charge this. One company in Milton Keynes, a strange new city built in the South Midlands, and which has tens of letting agencies as it is growing so fast, admitted to me that they ran a little scam with these fees. They would show the potential tenants a house knowing that they would reject them because they were, to quote 'unclean', but still took the £200 fee, knowing they would reject the tenants. On one house they showed me they had already taken £600. The arrogance was incredible that one of the staff boasted this to me. Of course the owner of the property does not see any of this fee, they only get the 85% of the rent, so it was straight into the letting agents' pockets. Now I know not all agents do this, but it is incredible that some can and do and no-one can do anything about it.
A new trick which appeared from letting agents in the mid-2000s was fixed contracts. When I revealed what was going on to landlords/ladies even some of them were shocked and one dropped the letting agent they were using. As you know, normally, if you want to leave a house or if the owner wants the tenant to leave, they give notice of usually 1-3 months. Under the fixed contracts, it does not matter if you give 6 months notice, you still have to pay up to the end of the contract. When I left Milton Keynes I was still liable to be paying rent on that house for 4 months after I had started paying rent on a house in the new town I was moving to. In addition the agency was still free to move someone into the house I had vacated and get rent from them too. I checked this with the Citizens' Advice Bureau and apparently there is no legal comeback. Letting agents now often guarantee rent to landlords/ladies and this is the way they cover months when it might be empty. Even madder, though they might have moved other tenants into the property, I was still liable for its upkeep, mowing the lawns, cleaning windows, etc., even though I lived 120 miles (192 Km) away by then. I obviously told them where to stick their idea but then they said I was a 'bad tenant' for questioning their procedures (despite me putting up with no oven and no central heating for 8-9 weeks without protest) and they would write a bad reference for me.
Family members of friends of mine ran into real financial problems with such fixed contracts. Rent on one property takes 55% of my income and I earn 50% above the national average salary, so imagine how tough it is for people on the average or less to have to pay two rents for months. No wonder debt is such a huge problem in the UK. Bascially running a letting agency is a licence to print your own money. They expect you to do the maintenance and pay them for the pleasure of doing so. Good letting agents are extremely rare, barely competent ones are the norm and greedy, swindling ones are increasingly common. The whole sector needs much more regulation as it is hurting the ordinary people.
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