HMO or not?

*Robin*

Quick question:
Are the rules different for HMOs and houses where the owner is resident, please?

eg. A six bedroom house; owner has one bedroom and rents out the other five to unrelated lodgers.
Bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, garden and storage areas all shared.

In the above instance, should the house be registered as a HMO, have hard-wired alarms, fire doors etc.?

HappyMJ

*Robin* wrote: »

Quick question:
Are the rules different for HMOs and houses where the owner is resident, please?

eg. A six bedroom house; owner has one bedroom and rents out the other five to unrelated lodgers.
Bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, garden and storage areas all shared.

In the above instance, should the house be registered as a HMO, have hard-wired alarms, fire doors etc.?

The rules are different for every council so you'll need to check with your council. Some will require all that, some might consider that to be overcrowded (can the living room accommodate everyone at once? - some councils require you to have 2 sitting rooms if that's not the case) and they not allow you to have so many rooms let out and some councils might not be too concerned at all.

Personally as there are so many residents I'd have the hard wired smoke alarms installed and any fire doors as necessary. You can get advice for all of this from the fire department. They'll even come out and install battery operated smoke alarms for free and instruct you on the best way of evacuating your property in an emergency and if there is any remedial work that should be undertaken.

scrabblers

As Happy MJ says, it depends on the Council … there are others who will know better than I, but my impression is that the Council don't vary their rules depending on if owner there or not - they set how many unrelated constitute an HMO and that's it (whether or not one of the unrelated is owner).

theartfullodger

As renting to 5 unrelated people it is without doubt a HMO. But may not require a license:

So check with local council if it needs a license.

But regardless of this it needs to be complaint with HMO regs (fire doors, alarms, notices etc etc). Yes, even with resident landlord, albeit the rules are a (little bit) different.

This is a reasonable introduction, but should check with local council (they have different rules).
https://www.rla.org.uk/landlord/guides/housing_act/docs/all/what_is_an_hmo.shtml

*Robin*

Thanks very much everyone, especially to Artful for the link. :T

Will contact local council, and also Fire Service for advice re recommended safety improvements.