Letting fees to be banned from June - MSE News

bris

Letting agents haven't been able to charge fees in Scotland for a long time now and they are still doing just fine.


It's also only a matter of time before the rest of the UK adopts Scotlands new lease system where there is no end date to a tenancy, it prevents unfair evictions. They have been talking about this for a while now.

Crashy_Time

bris wrote: »

Letting agents haven't been able to charge fees in Scotland for a long time now and they are still doing just fine.


It's also only a matter of time before the rest of the UK adopts Scotlands new lease system where there is no end date to a tenancy, it prevents unfair evictions. They have been talking about this for a while now.

Not really, it is a mixed picture, some have folded, some have downsized, rents didn`t really rise. Brexit will be a much bigger downward pressure on numbers wanting to rent though IMO.


https://blog.fixflo.com/what-was-the-impact-of-the-fees-ban-in-scotland

lordsarnoc

For what it's worth, having just got out of what I regard as the toxic world of renting (sorry if you're a landlord, that's how it feels).

Fees racked up over the course of the tenancy:
£190 application fee
£120 application fee for wife when she moved in after wedding
£35 for renewing tenancy after 6 months (I refused to pay or renew as we were in the process of buying a house anyway)
£75 checkout fee charged as standard if any work needed doing (on top of any other payable costs).
Total cost to the family exchequer of renting for just under 12 months:
£385, would have been £420 with the tenancy extension.

Bearing in mind that the agents only processed the application and inspected on a quarterly basis - and had to replace an extractor fan unit - I'd say they came out of that pretty well.

This is why fees make tenants angry. They're, simply, unfair. Renting is already an expensive and stressful game without the additional cost and stress of paying for people who are mostly passive aggressive, slow to react and generally a pain to deal with. This also destroyed my good will to sort stuff out myself (as I could have done in a couple of cases) because I had already paid so much for the "service".

I am left with an overwhelming sense of having been ripped off by the agents. Something for landlords to think about?

parking_question_chap

Good.
Too many properties in the hands of private landlords and those that cannot afford to buy at the mercy of agents ever increasing fees.

steampowered

Good.

Tenants can shop around for cheaper rents.

It is almost impossible for tenants to shop around based on letting agent fees.

Letting agencies can still charge souped up fees. They will just have to charge them to landlords instead. That will show how reasonable these fees really are !!!

seven-day-weekend

We have one rental property, which we recently decided to manage ourselves.

We used OpenRent to find a tenant and do the referencing. It cost us £49 and the tenant £20.

There is absolutely no need for exorbitant fees.

steampowered

Jumblebumble wrote: »

This is pretty unfair on landlords if tenants lie on the application form regarding CCJ's
The landlord would need to pay to find out that the tenant was being untruthful and this is only going to come from one source - increased rents
JumbleBumble

Landlords can easily check for CCJs themselves online. It only costs a few quid. The cost of a basic CCJ check is something like £8.

Foxtons charge tenants a fee of £250+VAT for their checks.

AG47

Crashy_Time wrote: »

It is the agents who charge the fees, they also charge landlords fees. This will mean that EA`s need more income from house sales, expect a lot of downward pressure on price expectations.

Yes I know a friend who works for an estate agent, he said the pressure to reach his targets is immense

He is suggesting much lower prices just to try and get some sales targets

AG47

Gwendo40 wrote: »

Dual agents (which most are) have been relying on lettings fees as their main source of income for the last decade or so, whilst commission from sales has just been the 'gravy'

I expect they'll now have to start getting a lot more realistic with their valuations and get back to the business of actually selling houses, rather than just indulging deluded vendors with their pie in the sky, fantasy figure asking prices.

Yes this is why a lot of people putting their properties on the market of late have been shocked at the lower valuations the agents come up with.

The gent doesn’t care they just want as many sales as possible to reach their targets now that they can’t get such an income stream from ripping off landlords renting out their properties.

AG47

What will happen if a tenant moves out and leaves the place in a right mess.

Will the agent be able to charge cleaning fees?

They usually say they need to take out some of the deposit because of this or that, but these are fees are they not?