Newham Council new Landlord Licensing – advice needed
If anyone is a current landlord in the borough of Newham please can you share your experience of council expectations of standard let properties?
I have reviewed their guide, however, today a letting agent commented that a buy to let property I was considering was very, very small and wouldn’t pass the council’s requirements.
I was surprised as the house was not small!
I checked the minimum square metre requirements for the bedrooms, kitchen and living/lounge/reception which seem to be pretty reasonable, i.e. not exceptionally large, e.g. 1 adult occupant in a bedroom, size must be minimum of 6.5 square metres.
Given the comment from the letting agent, I am now wondering if there is more to the story that is not being outlined/highlighted in the documentation that the council provide?
There is also a massive 30,000 application backlog in their system at the moment!
From what I have read, it appears at first pass that a landlord can’t legally let tenants move in until the license has been granted for new properties. The advice at the moment is that it takes 8 weeks to process the application (not sure if that takes current backlog into consideration), which is two months of mortgage payments without income from the property.
Is my understanding correct?
Has anyone bought and tried to license a property in Newham in 2013?
Any advice, warnings or tips you can offer will be appreciated.
Cheers
Sondra
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Member Since July 2013 - Comments: 293
8:12 PM, 20th December 2013, About 12 years ago
Thanks Mike. How do they calculate those room sizes, is it just physically the size of the room or is it the area of the whole flat divided by number of occupants that provide the minimum room sizes? The reason I am asking is that Southwark state on their website (updated Oct. 2011) that min. room size for an HMO room is 10 square metres, which is larger than 1 or 2 of our bedrooms. Irony is that we own leasehold ex-local authority flats (our landlord is Southwark Council) so how can the minimum room sizes be larger than flats for their own council tenants? (depending on how you calculate it of course)
Member Since August 2013 - Comments: 788
12:41 PM, 21st December 2013, About 12 years ago
Hi Yvette, the area of each room calculated, make sure you use every milimeter and including any area that leads to the room door, for example one of my rooms was roughly say 10′ x 11′, that makes it 110sq feet, which made it suitable for just 1 occupant, but then I used a clever trick, added a short passage that leads you out of the room as that is where the room door is, although you couldn’t swing a cat in this space, but it sure is part of the room so i added this little passage area roughly 3′ wide by 4′ long and that makes it another 12 sq feet,
And as for my actual tenants who live in this flat, they actually prefer to sleep 3 in the smallest room, so 3 people sleeping in 7.5sq meters room, so now I asked Newham what do they expect me to do about this? do I also tell my tenants where to sleep? where to eat? or how to position their bed, tables or chairs, or where they can watch their telly? and how to wipe their butt?