Bargaining power/discount for paying rent up front?

ET1976

I think you'd be nuts to pay more than 6 months in advance. Apart from anything else, what if your circumstances change and you want/need to move within the next 2 years?

As a LL I would only give a discount if I was having trouble getting a tenant. Maybe 6 months up front would persuade me to give a small discount but I wouldn't go further than that.

Remember that even if there are safeguards in place to protect you and your money, it's one thing being legally entitled to it and another to actually get it back.

NEH

I would be another one that would be wary to hand over that amount of cash over such a long period of time, 6 months max...You are young and things can change very quickly and from the other side you don't know what the landlord may want to do in the future...

We got a discount on our rent just by asking but we were only expecting a small discount. I don't think a landlord would offer that much discount on a £2000 property unless the market in that area is flooded.

martin1981

ET1976 wrote: »

I think you'd be nuts to pay more than 6 months in advance. Apart from anything else, what if your circumstances change and you want/need to move within the next 2 years?

As a LL I would only give a discount if I was having trouble getting a tenant. Maybe 6 months up front would persuade me to give a small discount but I wouldn't go further than that.

Remember that even if there are safeguards in place to protect you and your money, it's one thing being legally entitled to it and another to actually get it back.

Ok, I guess paying 12 months may be foolish, but like you say it seems more standard to pay 6 months in advance, so perhaps we should be looking at that. The kind of discount I mentioned was probably a bit too extreme, I thought that would be borderline in any case.

We'll be looking at several places in different areas too, so it wouldn't do any harm to ask, and we might end up "meeting in the middle" or something I suppose. It seems in some cases we might be lucky so if we've got time to fish around (which we will do) there's no reason we might not get a good deal, like the examples Longtimelurker mentioned in the earlier post.

Thanks everyone for all the advice so far, great forum!

FATBALLZ

If you're putting that much money up, upfront, make sure you run thorough credit checks on your landlord.

martin1981

FATBALLZ wrote: »

If you're putting that much money up, upfront, make sure you run thorough credit checks on your landlord.

Thanks for this advice, we're definitely going to be very wary after all the warnings. It's probably sensible to test the place out for 6 months anyway just in case there are problems which aren't immediately obvious. So we'll shop around, do all the checks, and go for a modest discount hopefully.

Cat1

Wher I live it's quite common for the letting agents to ask for 6 months rent in advance if you have children / pets / LHA :eek: I assume they also want a deposit and fees on top of this too!