HMO confusion and frustration

Jowo_2

JustSteph wrote: »

We are trying to do this legally, but the law is forcing us to have to consider illegality.

Right, so if I understand you correctly, the law is actually compelling you to break the law...:eek::rotfl:

In 12 weeks time, when you are due to leave your current accommodation, you should find it much easier to find onward accommodation precisely because thousands of students leave the city freeing up hundreds (or more) properties. It's a renters market.

University accommodation services will often let students stay in their halls over the summer period. Check with your Uni accommodation office.

Then there are the private accommodation providers that offer tenancies to students. These are just a couple.

http://www.unite-students.com/student-accommodation-glasgow
http://www.victoriahall.com/glasgow.html

In a worse case scenario, and you have nowhere else to live when your tenancy expires, then this is good advice about how to prevent homelessness, plus you can check the procedure on the council website.

http://scotland.shelter.org.uk/getadvice/advice_topics/homelessness?id=hp

CloudCuckooLand

wow, what did I miss...?!

BitterAndTwisted

Eh, not much. Poster asked question. Didn't like answers and was impolite about it, then threw toys out of pram and deleted their posts in a petulant huff. Just the usual student carp

Jowo_2

CloudCuckooLand wrote: »

wow, what did I miss...?!

Nothing particularly controversial, actually. The OP was a bit rude, claimed to have spent hours trying to find out the answers before he posted which took us seconds to find the information, and had a warped sense of ethics, but nothing out of the ordinary for this forum.

This is the recap - The OP is a student in Glasgow seeking accommodation in 3 months time when his current tenancy expires who sought to find out if the landlord or the tenant would get prosecuted if he moved to an unlicensed HMO (answer: Landlord).

He wanted to know if 3 unrelated students living in the same property could be classed as a HMO even if one of them wasn't on the tenancy agreement (answer: it is the number of tenants living there, not the number of bedrooms or the number who signed the tenancy agreement ).

As it is the landlord that gets prosecuted and fined, and if the tenants could still see out their tenancy despite the breach, then he was happy to move to a HMO that didn't have a licence because, of course, he was being forced to break these petty laws (HMO laws tightened up after the deaths of students in his city who died when they couldn't escape from the fire in a flat where there were bars on the window and no smoke alarm).

So if he's happy to expose himself to a higher safety risk that comes with unlicensed HMOs and being reported to the council by the neighbours who greatly resent flats with large numbers of students, then we're happy for him.

Incidentally, I had a temp job with a University accommodation office in that city many years ago, and I met a lot of pillocks like him who then were surprised that the landlord who gave them a tenancy in a poorly maintained, unlicensed HMO, then didn't undertake any repairs or return their deposit. We had a huge file of students submitting complaints about rogue landlords in Glasgow but then we had just as many calls from residents and landlords complaining about anti social behaviour by our students. It was in the period when the HMO legislation was new and despite the decrease in HMOs available to students, they were even back then (when student numbers were much lower) very resistant to considering 2 bedroom properties and if they did rent a 2 bedroom property, tended to install a third student in the living room to cut costs.