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