Community Legal Advice has recently posted 3 videos on YouTube that contain some good advice for the private renters. The videos are in sign language, dubbed, in English.

- What if I can’t afford the deposit?
- Can my landlord throw me out?
- What if I have difficulty paying my rent?

- When can my landlord come into my home?
- My home is damp and my things have been damaged. What can I do?
- What if my landlord won’t give my deposit back?

- How can I leave my shared house or flat?
- My neighbours are so noisy I can’t sleep. What can I do?

Community Legal Advice
Shelter

Renters are advised to not to pay rent up front for more than 1 month when moving into a property, unless they have proof that the landlord has not fallen behind with his mortgage payments. The number of buy-to-let investors who are in arrears, and face losing their property, has soared in the last 3 months.

Chris and Siobhan Taylor rented a five-bedroom house in Loughton, Essex, in August. They paid £48,000 upfront for the year after being offered a £6,000 discount. Now settled in, they have discovered that their landlord is already tens of thousands of pounds behind on his mortgage repayments.

‘We are feeling very vulnerable. We had no idea when we rented the property that this could happen. We just assumed that everything was OK. We face losing all our money and our deposit, or having to go to court, should the lender want to repossess during our one-year tenancy,’ says Siobhan, 39.

The Taylors have fallen into a gaping hole in the legislation covering tenants. As their rent is more than £25,000 a year, they had to sign a standard tenancy contract, not an assured shorthold tenancy contract, which would have given them a raft of protection.

It also means their initial £7,850 deposit was given directly to the landlord rather than being held by a third party under the Tenancy Deposit Protection Scheme.

Read the whole story at MailOnline.

It would normally be up to the letting agent to check that the landlord’s lender knows about the property being rented out but do not count on it - it would be wise to always ask for some sort of proof on paper.

The annual Buy-To-Let guide published on Monday by the Association of Residential Letting Agents ARLA contains a lot of valuable information for not only landlords but tenants as well.

Click here to read the electronic version.

We found this excellent overview of the key elements of a tenancy, which lists the legislation requirements of England/Wales and Scotland (page 21 of the guide).

ARLA stresses in the article accompanying this table that tenants should always insist on a written agreement (although it is not a legal requirement) in order that they are aware of all their obligations and also those of their landlord. They advise not to settle for an agreement that is bought from newsagents, as it might not be up to date. By the way - ARLA standard tenancy agreement runs to some 20 pages!

Telegraph lead us to an organisation called Residential Property Tribunal Service, which provides an independent and fair tribunal service for resolving disputes between landlords and tenants. Participants don’t need a lawyer, they can represent themselves, and in the majority of cases they don’t have to pay any court fees later, as the problem gets solved.

The service does not have the power to deal with all types of dispute about rents, and cannot become involved in disputes about commercial property. They resolve issues with:

- Rent When the landlords want one figure and the tenants want another;
- Service charge When tenants dispute the maintenance charges for the common parts;
- Buying the freehold When tenants can’t agree a price with the landlords;
- Leasehold extension When a tenant wants to extend their lease at a new rate;
- Breach of lease When landlords say a tenant has breached his lease, and the tenant disagrees;
- Right to buy When local authority landlords won’t sell to the tenants.

On their website they have a record of the decisions they have made on their file, if you want to have a look.

The Landlord Law Blog writes of an interesting case in hand.

A London tenant is bringing a claim against his former landlords and their agents, who took over 5 months into the contract to register the deposit.

Under the UK Housing Law agents or landlord must protect the deposit taken within 14 days from receipt of the deposit from the tenant.

The tenant has filed a claim in West London County Court for 3x the deposit as per law.

Make sure that your deposit is protected!

The sale and rent back deals need regulation with better protection for consumers, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) study. The relatively new type of property transaction whereby firms buy homes from individuals at a discount, and then allow those individuals to stay on in the property as tenants, has caused serious harm to vulnerable homeowners.

The study found that:

- some consumers enter into sale and rent back transactions when this is not the best option for them

- some sale and rent back firms may mislead customers as to the value of their property or the security they have as tenants. This includes telling people they will be able to stay in their home for years, when in reality the tenancy may only be guaranteed for six to 12 months

- some firms impose substantial rent increases or even evict tenants after a short tenancy period. It is also possible that tenants may lose their homes if the landlord defaults on the mortgage, and

- some consumers are evicted because they cannot afford the agreed rent, which suggests staying in their property was not sustainable in the first place.

- there are upwards of 1,000 firms, together with an unknown number of non-professional landlords, who have conducted about 50,000 transactions to date.

Source: Sale and rent back firms need statutory regulation - OFT report