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Don’t ever deal with DSS council tenants…ever…! The council housing officers in the homeless persons units up and down the country, but especially in London, are advising tenants to ignore Section 21 notices. They are also advising tenants to ignore Court Orders for Possession. They are saying that if the tenant leaves before they are physically evicted by a court bailiff, they are making themselves intentionally homeless and therefore are not eligible for council accommodation or emergency accommodation.

This is the stance being adopted by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets homeless persons unit. This is a total contradiction to what I was told by the housing manager, Noella Ling, of Tower Hamlets Housing. She told me at a recent Tower Hamlets Landlords Forum that they routinely ignored section 21 notices because of the perceived risk of collusion between the landlord and the tenant to obtain council accommodation. They don’t take into account any background or circumstances surrounding the section 21 notice being issued. Then the landlord is forced to prepare papers and files and apply to the court for a possession order. This costs £175. Once possession is ordered by the courts, the tenant then takes the order to the homeless persons unit and asks to be re-housed. The homeless persons unit officer (or housing options officer -- in this case Andre Melvin) instructs the tenant to ignore the warrant for possession and refuses to re-house her (or the tenant refuses the council’s offer of accommodation because it’s not exactly what she wants!).

End result? I have to spend yet more money and waste more time arranging bailiffs to come and evict her so that she can take the letter of eviction to the homeless persons unit verifying she’s been evicted and the locks have been changed before the council will re-house her!

What a crazy situation and that is why I am advising all landlords in the private rental sector (PRS) to boycott council tenants and stop giving their properties to agents that promote “guaranteed rent schemes”, “leasing schemes” and other schemes that invariably involve council tenants and tenants on DSS.

In tough times there is a flight to quality. It happens in the financial industry, so why not in the residential property market?

Landlord barricades £1m property to stop US family leaving.

Source: We shall be moved: family defies landlord’s skip blockade

Christopher Jefferies, the retired English master and landlord of murdered Joanna Yeates, has put his flat on the market for £245,000.

Source: Joanna Yeates murder: landlord Chris Jefferies puts Bristol flat on the market

1. They all bend the truth (alot) about the number of “waiting tenants” they have for property like yours that tenants are desparate to rent from you and they will let your property TODAY with a holding deposit too.
2. They take holding deposits from prospective tenants and charge big fees for “administration” of the referencing process.
3. They don’t, as a matter of course or good practice, credit check tenant applicants. One agent told me it’s because we the landlord aren’t advancing the tenant any credit, the tenant pays their rent in advance, so no credit checks required. I wasn’t going to waste my time to educate the man (nice though he was!).
4. They jealously guard their “leads” from everybody and think only of the amount of commission they are going to get from the deal.
5. Agents don’t work in the best interests of anybody but themselves. The landlord AND the tenant pays for the service and neither party gets that good of a deal.
6. They whack on hidden charges at the end (usually at the point of monies being transferred to the landlord) so that you can’t do anything but accept the charge or dispute it and try to take them to court (which oftentimes is not a good idea, to throw good money after bad).
7. They rush tenants into making rash decisions quickly.
8. They don’t check whether the landlord is happy to begin the referencing process, they just start the referencing process and it’s very difficult for a landlord to back out without incurring some costs just because they get a bad “feeling” about the prospective tenants. The agent works on the basis that unless some negative information is found, why would a landlord want to reject the tenant!
9. The agent misrepresents the landlord and markets the property inappropriately.
10. The agent competes with the landlord’s own advertising on Gumtree.com by spamming Gumtree with duplicate adverts at lower prices just to entice tenants to go through them (which costs ALL parties much more money).

If you’ve got any more experiences about letting agents then post a comment below and tell me.

I’m a landlord and I’m going through a situation right now which is sucking up masses of my time to
deal with, again caused by a so-called lettings agent called Taylor Tate Limited of www.taylortate.com. Everybody beware of this company, they are a bunch of shysters.

I placed and advert on Gumtree and within a few days received an enquiry from this company claiming they could let my property out in a week on a no let, no fee basis. I rejected their advance at first on the basis I did not want any agents acting on my behalf. Frankly they are ALL useless!

Then this guy, John Phillips from Taylor Tate Limited, got back to me and said he would only charge me £500 plus VAT to let the property. I thought why not, nothing to lose. How wrong was I!!

The long story short is this: the agent was instructed by me to find FOUR sharers. They found FIVE sharers and proceeded to mislead me into agreeing a tenancy to five students. Now anybody that knows even a little about HMO regulations knows that a property of 3 storeys or more, with 5 or more sharers forming 2 or more households is an automatically licenceable HMO, with all the expense of sinks, fire doors, fire alarm system etc etc.

Well apparently Taylor Tate didn’t know this and then tried to dupe the prospective tenants into signing up to an agreement illegally by signing only four persons but he told them “it would be okay to move 5 people in, just don’t tell the landlord”. This is an illegal act and I was liable for a fine of up to £20,000 plus all the rent paid by the tenants was returnable!

So the five boys paid Taylor Tate nearly £5,000 and so far they’ve only got back £2,046, a loss of just under £3,000! Taylor Tate are refusing to refund them all their money back and threatening legal action against me for breach of contract. Of course there was no valid contract so I’m not going to pay them any of their fee for non-performance. I’ve lost no money other than the fact I could’ve had four rent paying tenants in the property a week ago, so until I find some new tenants I’m losing money.

To summarise, everybody (landlords and tenants) beware of Taylor Tate at http://www.taylortate.com as they are fraudsters, pure and simple.

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