Wednesday, 10 September 2008

My first blog



Yep its me Natasha,

I am a brand new landlady after finally agreeing to move into my boyfriends house. I am now renting out my former home and I am also renting out my friend Susan's home, she has gone travelling for a predicted 3 years and asked me to look after it. Nice to be trusted. Anyway lets move on....

This is my blog and online diary where I am writing to the world and to Susan about my experiences as a landlord/landlady and no I am not a cross dresser.

Lets start with the word Landlord, that term aggravates me. I am sure if I had time to do the research (which i don't) that the buy to let market in the UK is pretty much male dominated. That's not a bad thing in itself but I am a woman and when I speak to people I would like to be called a Landlady not a landlord. Sounds a bit picky I know but that's me I like things to be correct and precise especially when people are speaking to me about their services and products.

So back to why I am writing this blog about my experiences as a fledgling landlady. I thought it would be a good idea for me to write down my experiences as I step through the tricky buy to let market in the UK and perhaps it will help others.

OK so I moved into my boyfriends and now I am a business lady in the buy to let market. I had spent some time on the web and looked at the benefits of managing the rental on my own or appointing a letting agent.

After allot of hard thinking and lots of discussion with my partner I came to the conclusion that I did have time to manage one property myself. Now as I said earlier I am looking after two homes, Susan's and mine. So, I thought I would hedge my bets and use a letting agent for Susan's and manage my home myself. At least that way I had a chance of learning the trade as I could use what the agent was saying on Susan's home and apply the knowledge to my property.

After much searching and asking around I appointed a letting agent for Susan's home. This went fairly quickly. That was now in play and I need to source a way to do it for my place. I asked around and a couple of friends told me to go to LetSafe on the web as they have some good advice on their website for landlords. Here's the link: http://www.letsafe.net/

I had a good read and after being surprised at just how much free information for landlords there was on there I came away knowing allot more than I did. So a good start but I expected it to be the thin edge of the wedge. I have added links to the bits of information I found there that proved most useful for me as a beginner.

All about gas, electrical safety and a few other important bits of info

Buildings and contents insurance for landlords - normal home insurance doesn't work :o(

Some really good advice for landlords about tenancy agreements

Loads of good information about how you have to handle deposits from tenants

This next link was a god send for me and really opened my eyes
Now on to the rest of what happened.......
My newly appointed letting agent explained the process to me, they hold a deposit which is all above board. I checked it all out here http://www.letsafe.net/default.asp?contentID=713

Now satisfied that everything was above board they told me that I had allot of choices to make about how my home would be let and what services I wanted. Essentially the services seemed to boil down to one phrase "landlord protection".

I took notes while I was there, returned to my boyfriends, and hit the net. There seems to be a dizzying array of sites out there offering services for landlords but as my letting agent was already advocating LetSafe ( http://www.letsafe.net/ ) and I had been there before I stuck with the brand.

There seems to be 7 main ways to protect yourself from disaster as a buy to let operator, links below are what I found on the LetSafe site:






Eviction Services - http://www.letsafe.net/default.asp?contentID=623 hope to never need this but if your getting into letting you need to know

I will get into these in more detail later in the blog but as you can see there is allot to think about. I will tackle Rent Guarantee first as this is the first thing the letting agent advised me to do.

This essentially is an insurance against your tenants not paying their rent (does what it says on the tin).

Now what I didn't know is that it isn't something you can have on its own as such. The majority of worth while Rent Guarantee products require Tenant Referencing as a must have. I guess this gives the insurers the ability to actually evaluate the risk they are insuring.

Now I checked allot of them out and some of them seemed a bit , well not to my liking is all I can say. Some of the companies required subscription to get a decent rate or I had to set myself up as a letting agent before they would consider me. Then came the problem of getting some decent information.

I tried to get a rate card from some companies and was told they didn't want my business!! Now I appreciate that I may well be small fry but how does that bode for their larger suppliers, with service like that I cant see those organisations keeping their position as the largest forever, didn't they read about what happened to the Roman Empire!!!

Now being pretty miffed at being treated like the proverbial toilet tissue on the shoe, I decided to actually call LetSafe rather than just hitting their site for information and online help. Luckily I hit gold.

The person I spoke to talked me through the pages on their website that applied to rent guarantee and I have included the link here for you:

I explained that I had been trawling the net for hours and the sort of responses I was getting. They actually said sorry on behalf of their competitors but it was obvious to me that I wouldn't be going through the same obstacles on the phone call to LetSafe. Early days yet though so they had to be consistent in their service to win my trust completely.

Now as I said I had already been doing allot of research before deciding to call LetSafe and I am glad I did. I was bowled over by the service (easy i guess after the poor service up until this point). I was getting good information and solid help as a cold enquiry not an existing customer but I was also taken back a bit by the competitive pricing of their Rent Guarantee service.

I went for the £99.00 product which covered me for legal expenses and lasts 12 months. There were others available but this one suited me as I had found a tenant that wanted to rent my old home for a year.

Like I said earlier, most reputable Rent Guarantee products require tenant referencing to be carried out for the Rent Guarantee to be valid. The customer service person at LetSafe explained to me that they also do tenant referencing and that they are actually recognised as one of the best in the industry. Now I am never one to accept it when someone gives a bold statement like that. So armed with this information I made a quick call to the letting agent I had appointed for Susan's house and began investigating LetSafe's claim.

Not all surprises are nice but I was glad to be surprised on this occasion as my letting agent told me that they use LetSafe for their Tenant Checks and that they get the majority of them back in 2 working days pass or fail. OK, so LetSafe was checking out nicely and as you can probably tell from this blog entry I am still very very happy with them.

I now had all my ducks in line. First things first I thought I would use Susan's house as the guinea pig for the rent guarantee process (sorry Susie if your reading this). I spoke to the letting agent who said I have a choice of 6 months or 12 months and that they could source a tenant for either term. I explained that I wanted rent guarantee and that I wanted the tenants checked properly, by now I had my fill of online only ref firms that gave surface checks rather than getting into the depth that would allow me to sleep at night.

My letting agent explained that they use LetSafe as they had previously told me and that if I wanted rent guarantee that they would order full reference checks on any applicants that wished to begin living there. I told them to go ahead and waited for the phone to ring.

Bang!!! Two days later on Thursday the letting agent was on the line. They had sourced two tenants for me, both working people and they had started the ball rolling on the references. True to their word the references were back by Monday and a date was confirmed for the tenants to move in. This was quick and it took me by surprise to be honest. But to their credit the letting agent had warned me that LetSafe moved quickly and this just proved it to me.

So I had now confirmed by personal experience everything the customer service desk at LetSafe told me on the phone. "2 working day turnaround" for referencing checked out and I was being told by many people that they were the best bet for service and cost. My buy in and trust to the LetSafe brand was becoming stronger through their desire to meet their promises...the best way I am sure you will all agree.

So now I called LetSafe back and decided to go with their Rent Guarantee and Tenant Referencing for my own home. I paid the money by credit card over the phone and within an hour I had received the forms I needed, an instruction sheet, and my i.d. to use if I needed to call them and discuss anything.

All I needed to do now was find someone to rent my property.

I put an advert in the weekly local paper and low and behold I had two applicants ( a lovely young married couple who I met personally) come forward. I explained that I would need to get references on them which they were fine with and I gave them the forms to fill in. I got the completed forms back the next day and I faxed them over to LetSafe. Within the hour I received a receipt to confirm they had received them in my email box. Nice touch, thought I might have to call them to check. So now the waiting began and I had to sit tight while LetSafe did their thing.

I sent the forms to LetSafe on Monday and true to form and previous experience they came back Wednesday morning. Once again they were ticking all the right boxes and I felt that I could now start sleeping a little better at night knowing I had found a good company that I would probably use in the future if I needed to.

Everything was fine with the references and they were able to recommend Thomas & Janice as tenants, they also confirmed that the Rent Guarantee policy documents would be with me in about two weeks with cover being in place there and then. A great start.

Now not everyone wants Rent Guarantee but as a UK Landlady this seems stupid to me. The economy at the moment seems to be at its lowest for some time so making sure you have some way to insure the rent you are getting from tenants is invaluable to me. I still have a mortgage to pay on my property and I am not a lottery winner so I cant afford to take the risk, even If I could why would I want to.

While the whole Rent Guarantee process can seem complicated on the surface LetSafe proved that with the right company it can be simple and quick.
So Susan if you are reading this it is all sorted, and the rent is now guaranteed :o) I hope you haven't got time to read it but if you do remember to bring me the tomahawk back from the grand canyon...you promised.

For other people who may be looking around for a provider (and aren't lucky enough to be taking helicopter flights and treks through the grand canyon) and are looking for a company that offers good service and provides products at competitive prices then I would recommend LetSafe in the blink of an eye.

Because I took out rent guarantee with LetSafe I have Legal Cover included in that, but for those of you that don't have or don't feel the need for rent guarantee it is worthwhile knowing what your getting into and what to do if you run into trouble with your tenants and have no rent guarantee in place.

I will write about the Legal Cover subject a bit later as I am running out of time today. But in the meantime here are some links from LetSafe that might prove helpful:




Best of luck :) Tasha




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