Renting out my house

cashorcheque

Yes, £3800 (student loans and pensions).
Thank you!

cashorcheque

Just to add - bitterandtwisted, I've just written down all the info I've got from this post and clicked through to the older post to write down the information from that. I thought then that it would take me almost 2 hours to commute (based largely on RAC routeplanner) but in actual fact it's only 70 minutes and I've been doing it a couple of weeks now. Also, there was no resounding damnation of the idea at all even then - just people cautioning me and offering helpful advice about the potential risks and pitfalls. Nobody said I shouldn't do it, in fact!

mynameisdave

Travelodge, if booked in advance, offer rooms for £19 a night. Then you would only need to commute Monday morning and Wednesday evening. It would also knock 4 ~60 mile trips off so you should easily pay for one of those nights with petrol savings.

Seems easier to me than the potential hassle of being a LL

N79

cashorcheque wrote: »

We were going to go with Tucker Gardner (we have dealt with them before as buyers rather than tenants, and know a landlord and several tenants who are all happy with them) but now that you have said that we will reserve judgement until we've been to an NLA meeting or two.

N79 wrote: »

Some of the local agents are excellent, some mediocre and many of them just plain crap. Please Please research very very hard before choosing your agent - get one of the bad ones and it could cost you tens of thousands. The easiest way to find the good agents is to join the NLA and go to some local meetings and then discuss the agents with LL's.

If you are going to go into this risky process then I just want to re highlight my post as clearly you have not yet carefully selected your rental agent.

cashorcheque

Yes, sorry, that was what I was trying to say. We won't make any decisions about who we should use until we have much firmer evidence to go on. Thank you.

Annabee

~It is very clear that some of you have never had children!

I am sure the OP would not want to be apart from her young baby for several days at a time, whether or not she is breastfeeding.

Brb

Yes definately check out your agent and any contract very carefully. You could end up sacking them but still forced to pay them year in year out purely because THEIR tenant is in there. Also if a bad letting agent breaks the law (and a few of them do regularly blissfully unaware) then it would still be you that is held liable. They are your employees at the end of the day and as such you are responsible for their actions as well as your own. Ask to see what tenancy agreements they plan to use and go through the list of unfair clauses that the OFT have deemed unfair. I say this because it would be a good indicator that they either know/don't know what they're doing.

Housing laws can be very confusing for a novice/accidental LL, you could potentially risk your freedom (break some housing laws and you'll could see yourself in prison). So please don't think ppl are all doom and gloom for no reason.

Wish you well

seraphina

Apologies if I'm missing this but who's looking after the baby? Nurseries are about £700/month for 5 days a week in Cambridge - you may get a site discount and childcare vouchers but it's still a lot of cash each month.

seraphina

Also how firm is your consent to let? Do you have it in writing for your specific circumstances? Although many mortgages say that consent to let may be granted for a fee, on closer inspection CTL is only granted whenever rent >> mortgage payments. This is clearly not the case.

And as for living apart from your children, I have a Chinese post-doc whose wife works in Manchester. They have two children - the elder girl (about 6) lives with her dad here, whilst their young son lives in China with the grandparents. It's a question of what you're used to - and beggars can't be choosers.

Annabee

Living apart from your children - one would hope that the OP's circumstances are not as bad as your Chinese colleage.

What is the point of having children if you don't live with them if at all possible. They won't know who their parents are, will they?
There is the possibility of growing up with psychological damage.