House for sale , but currently let

scaniarob

Hello,

Quick question , one of my houses was on market last year for short amount of time with ea for sale or to let, after 2 weeks ea let the property for 6 months, ea has said there has been a lot of interest in the house since christmas with a view to buy , morally what would the tenant think , they knew the property was on the market when they rented , but ea does not want to naff the tenant off by showing to viewers, he say potential prob and it would be better if we gave tenant notice in feb of 2 months them activly market it again when empty.
personaly i,m easy with either option , yes i would like it sold , but like wise he,s a good tenant (pays his rent and dont give any aggro)
anyone been a similar postion your comments would be appreciated regards rob :beer:

PasturesNew

He knew it was for sale or rent, but maybe he also thought that as he'd rented it, it wasn't for sale any more as you didn't need to sell it.

Remember that from a tenant's perspective, if you give him notice he has just two months to find a new place, pay £150-300 or so new agent fees, find another £1000 or so deposit .... not to mention the cost of moving and the hassle of packing everything up and cleaning the place to within an inch of its life... not easy if you keep getting let down like this!

scaniarob

i forgot to mention that the ea is split into two parts , one guy wants to sell and the other guy has a tenant in the property so quite clearly only one of them is making any money , i would be happy to continue renting it to the tenant , like wise the 60k of equity is also quite tempting at the moment , ideal solution would be for the tenant to buy it i suppose because him and his gf did also enquire about buying it before they viewed , may be i should just go round and be honest with them and see what there longer term plans are.:D

PennyPincher_L

yeah being honest is always good.. it will keep you out of trouble in future

PasturesNew

Yes, speak to them. See what they say. However, you might want to check your rental agreement as a lot of letting agents want a %age of the sale value if you sell it to your tenant. There are ways round that though, with a tenant who wants to play ball ... they can simply buy the house and go through the motions of handing in their notice with you and actually physically move everything out of the house (round the corner in a van), do the checking out procedure, hand over the keys, then come back an hour later and move back in again. A member of this board did that - when they went through the checking out process with the agent, little did he know that they had actually bought the house a few days earlier and really, secretly, already owned it.

hometrader

scaniarob wrote: »

i forgot to mention that the ea is split into two parts , one guy wants to sell and the other guy has a tenant in the property so quite clearly only one of them is making any money , i would be happy to continue renting it to the tenant , like wise the 60k of equity is also quite tempting at the moment , ideal solution would be for the tenant to buy it i suppose because him and his gf did also enquire about buying it before they viewed , may be i should just go round and be honest with them and see what there longer term plans are.:D

Can't you just let the tenancy lapse, and just have them there month-on-month - That way potential purchasers won't be too put off as they wouldn't have to wait months for a tenant to move out (only the notice period, and that's prob going to be around the length of the sale anyway) plus you will still be getting a bit of rent in.

If you do this make sure that the estate agent accompanies the viewers so the tenant doesn't say anything to put them off.