House rent

Dan29

melancholly wrote:

that's quite interesting - i guess as a postgrad student that wouldn't fit for me, i need to be at university all year round.... but it explains the situation for people i know. do you specify anything in the contract about that or is it just an 'understanding'?

Good question I haven't got a copy of the contract to hand but we discussed it with the letting agent before letting the house for the first year, and that's their standard policy; how it's worded in the contract I can't remember exactly. Never had any problems though. If we had tenants who were postgrad students they'd pay full rent for July and August to continue living in the property, and we would obviously make sure they had sufficient notice of any work that we intended to do to the house during that time.

melancholly wrote:

(and clearly in the OP's case, this understanding was quite one-sided, and even if the landlord feels justified, this should have been conveyed to all the tenants).

Definitely. Doesn't sound justified to me.

nige

We pay half rent for July only, two of us moved in within the first week of July too, the landlord had explained to us that as we are renting from the start of July we are allowed to live there and that the half rent is because during the month of July they expect to have complete access to the property to do any work and we totally agreed. The half rent was for the inconvenience of the landlords needing access, considering most people here pay higher rents and don't get any half rent (although slowly more and more seem to be getting half rent for July and August) this seemed extremely fair.

While we were in halls we got a reduced rent too through being opposite a building site (they were putting up new halls) so I think if you pay rent you should be able to live there (possibly not with a reduced rent, but depends how much the landlord will require access as it does classify as an inconvenience to me), we were lucky enough to get great landlords and we checked the contract ourselves and with the university housing advice people before we signed (the university people said we had one of the best contracts they had seen as there was no ambiguity).