Viewing A Rental with Landlord

deannagone

Why are you viewing rentals when you haven't even got a buyer let alone sold your house?  More or less doubling your expenses (and renting a detached 5 bed house can't be a cheap option) doesn't really seem to make much sense right now.  I'd put off the viewings until you are near exchange on your house.. which will be some months away.  

And you are viewing a very popular rental house, knowing there will be other people viewing without CCJ's who don't have a house to sell (and needing to finance the other house)? 

None of this makes sense. 

According to your previous thread you have a litle time until there is any hope of adjusting your credit file. 

Murphybear

macfan21 said:

macman said:

Firstly, you don't know for sure that the LL will run a credit check. But, if they do, which tenants would you take? One with both parties having CCJ's on their history, or ones that are clean?
Some LL's will love the idea of 6m rent upfront, others will run a mile because it's often an indication that the tenants will be using the property for pharmaceutical production, or as a brothel. You have no way of knowing how this particular LL will view it. I'd just be honest and answer the questions that are asked, no more.
Offering large wodges of cash upfront just smacks of desperation.

One letting agent we spoke to said that the only way around ccjs (for them anyway) was to pay 6 months rent upfront so I think it’s fairly normal where poor credit is concerned. 

I agree that we don’t know if the landlord will run a credit check but the house is a 5 bed detached and he’s going through a letting agent so I’d be surprised if not (however the letting agency do advertise that there’s no referencing fees to pay). 

That’s a red herring as they cannot charge fees any more

Murphybear

macman said:

Firstly, you don't know for sure that the LL will run a credit check. But, if they do, which tenants would you take? One with both parties having CCJ's on their history, or ones that are clean?
Some LL's will love the idea of 6m rent upfront, others will run a mile because it's often an indication that the tenants will be using the property for pharmaceutical production, or as a brothel. You have no way of knowing how this particular LL will view it. I'd just be honest and answer the questions that are asked, no more.
Offering large wodges of cash upfront just smacks of desperation.

Having worked in the business for years we never had a single tenant who did this

AdrianC

Murphybear said:

macman said:

Firstly, you don't know for sure that the LL will run a credit check. But, if they do, which tenants would you take? One with both parties having CCJ's on their history, or ones that are clean?
Some LL's will love the idea of 6m rent upfront, others will run a mile because it's often an indication that the tenants will be using the property for pharmaceutical production, or as a brothel. You have no way of knowing how this particular LL will view it. I'd just be honest and answer the questions that are asked, no more.
Offering large wodges of cash upfront just smacks of desperation.

Having worked in the business for years we never had a single tenant who did this

The plural of anecdote is still not data, but we have several friends who HAVE had this...

AdrianC

macfan21 said:

I’m more specifically asking whether to have the conversation with landlord vs letting the letting agents tell him. If you see that thread, the last post was asking this very question but had no response. 

If it were me, I’d remember the prospective tenant that was honest about their situation rather than someone that didn’t have the conversation with me but that’s likely just because I’ve been in the situation. 

Definitely talk to the landlord.
If he's positive - great.
If he's negative, save your time and effort.

Remember, it's ultimately a person-to-person relationship, tenant and landlord. The agent is merely somebody the landlord is paying to act on his behalf.

macfan21

deannagone said:

None of this makes sense.

Thanks for your opinion. There’s zero sense in even trying to sell our house until we know we can secure another property and given the ccjs I mentioned, it would be more dangerous to wait til near completion of a sale until looking for a house where there is a distinct possibility that renting could be much more difficult. 

That being said, we are fortunate enough to be in a position where we don’t need to sell our house to pay the rent on the house we are looking at. The house also won’t be available until the end of August so if we get a sale relatively quickly (fully expected in my area and market), we would have about a month overlap which would also mean we could take our time moving our possessions, and aim to complete by the end of September to take advantage of the zero stamp duty for <£250k houses. 

Anyway, we had our viewing and the landlord began asking about our jobs so it came up naturally. We were honest with them and they said the ccjs weren’t an issue for them so we now need to wait for the rest of their booked viewings and then presumably they will offer the house to one of the prospective tenants and go from there.