When we left the UK we left our property being fully managed by an Estate Agents. They gave us the impression that they had a family all lined up ready to move in. Anyway it turned out that that family fell through and so they ended up putting a different family in who were on Housing Benefits!! Not that I have a problem with housing benefit tenants.....but it would have been nice to be consulted first.
Everything was going smoothly with them for the first 6 months. Housing benefit paid around 2/3rds of the rent leaving the tenant to pay the remainder - simple you'd think, only the tenants changed their minds. Instead they decided not to pay anything! Cutting a long story short we gave the tenants notice in January that we wouldnt be renewing their tenancy agreement at the end of March. They were fine with this and made lots of promises to repay all their arrears by the time they moved out. Moving day came and they didnt answer the door......and didnt move out. After lots of pestering by our agents they finally moved out leaving behind a garden and garage full of furniture and garbage and a dirty house with stinking carpets. Thankfully they didnt trash any of the fittings and fixtures!
By the time they left we were down by about 700 pounds (sorry no pound sign on this keyboard) - we managed to use their bond of 550 pounds to get most of the work done so all in all we're probably down by about 1000! We're just waiting for the house to be cleaned right through now and hopefully we'll have tenants in by the end of the month!
The joys of being a landlord from the other side of the world!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment