Landlord advice

[MrChips]

superlightr said:

You have to be mad to diy with no experience.

One of the benefits of an agency is that they will be taking on a lot of the legal obligations of ensuring the house is safe to use, of the liability of employing competent and qualified contractors when required, of ensuring your legal interests in the property are protected, that you are uptodate with all the regulations, that you have a proper tenancy agreement and you have some come back if they screw up. Plus if you find a decent agency ie family long standing good reputation you will benefit from that expereince in getting issues solved quickly, getting a property let to the right tenants and you will save a lot of hassle.

Makes me laugh when new Landlords say Ive have 15 phone calls in 2 hrs - err but would you want to let to all of them? Finding tenants is piss easy - its getting the right tenants, doing the right checks, asking the right questions, keeping them happy, getting the best rent, keeping voids small, providing a good service, keeping uptodate with the laws, As said if you have no experience you have to be mad to DIY

We dived in last September and are about to swap out our first tenants for our second lot. I don't think you need to be mad, in fact whilst trying not to generalise, there are not many letting agents i've had dealings with that i would expect to be able to do a better job. It is however quite a lot of research but understandably so. The local agents to me all wanted around £1400 up front just as a finders fee. We did it myself for under £100, did all the viewings ourselves which actually helped us decide on who to offer the house to. We used an online letting agent, who did the references, and used some of the savings we made to take out rental income insurance, home gas/electric cover, as well as upgrading the normal building insurance to the best we could find.
It's also worth noting that some of the agents contracts that I was given as a guide seem to be keen to ensure that final liability still rested with me as the landlord and they were simply the messenger. Fine if you know it upfront, but i felt i'd be chasing the agent to ensure the gas safety certificate was sorted which is the same amount of effort as sorting it myself!

I think the bigger questions are how easy is it for you to get to the property in the event of an emergency, do you have the right insurance and tradesman backup, and are you capable of reading up on the legislation/requirements and understanding it all so you can put it into practice.

We're just about to have to change some flooring, and redecorate a couple of walls, with only a couple of days between changeover of tenants (not quite how i planned it though), so i'm hoping this changeover will help me learn a bit more.

OP feel free to pm me and i'll send you a copy of the contract we use so you have a second version to check you're not missing anything. I think ours was mainly based on the landlords association version, combined with one from the online agent.

Either way best of luck!

Edited by MrChips on Monday 20th June 23:20