100% rent increase - unfair rent

Niknak73

Hi!
Can anyone help please? My mum owns a 1/4 share of her house through a housing association. She's paid her mortgage element off, and continues to pay rent to the housing association. Her rent increases by a small amount each year (say £30), but she's just received a letter saying that in two weeks time, it's increasing from £219.22 per month, to £438.44 a month!! DOUBLED!! She's really worried, as she is 71 years old, receives a state pension of about £500 a month and a private pension of £200 a month. Her council tax (with single person reduction) is just over £90 a month. She would be left with about £150 a month to pay all her other bills, buy food, pay for repairs/ maintenance on the house (the housing association don't pay for ANY maintenance).
Surely this is unfair? She wanted to check out her rights etc, before challenging the housing association. She doesn't want to be forced into selling her 1/4 share back to them (although they do keep writing and asking her if she would like to).
Thanks.

N79

What type of tenancy does your mother have with the Housing Association?

G_M

Register and place this enquiry on the landlordzone forum.

Contact Shelter.

Pete*G_4

Get the house valued for market rental rate. Work out 75% of it, and that's what your mum is eligable to pay. If she's now being charged more than that then I'd say you had a case to dispute it.

Check the terms of the tenancy agreement though, because for a jump in price that much I'd suggest perhaps she was on a discounted/fixed rate and that has now ended.

Oldernotwiser

Your mother could look at claiming housing benefit for help towards her rent. Put her details into www.entitledto.co.uk to give you an idea of what she could claim.

Edit: On the figurse you have given it looks as if your mother would be entitled to about 4.00 per week Pension Credit, 16.00 per week Council Tax Credit and 87.00 per week Housing Benefit.

Entitledto isn't always accurate but it certainly looks as if these benefits are worth investigating as, with extra benefits of 106.00 per week, she could actually be better off than she is now, after her rent goes up. It may also be easier for her to claim this than to fight the rent increase.

NB. some of these figures won'tapply if she has savings of over 6,000

poppysarah

She needs to get all the paperwork associated with her shared ownership and have a read.

A thread here
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=141&t=657095&nmt=50%%20rent%20increase%20on%20a%20shared%20ownership%20property
from last year

You should look at how much rents cost though for similar HA properties - if she's been paying not a huge amount for a long time then she's been very lucky.

219 a month for 3/4 would make the rent equivalent 292 a month for a whole one - sounds cheap to me - is 584 the equivalent local rent on her type of home?

tbs624

See here, from a previous thread

poppysarah

tbs624 wrote: »

See here, from a previous thread

So over the next two years a lot of rents have to go up....?

Kazby

Hi Niknak, it seems awfully strange for your mum's rent to go up by such a large amount with a housing association (even with the rent restructuring programmes). Has she called them to check that the figure is correct? Shouldn't take more than a few minutes.