Tenants: Government rules meant to protect you just gave you a rent increase

Dear tenants,

The government has just brought in yet another charge, a £65-a-year fee for each property to be registered on the PRS Database. That means you’ll need a rent increase of around £6 per month just to cover it.

All the information needed for the property database, the council already has for selective licensing. The council already charges around £1,000 every five years for this, which works out at £200 per year, or another £20 per month in rent.

Previously, we could just agree between ourselves that if the rent was £1,000 and you were paying £750, for example, we could agree verbally to increase it to £775 or £800.

Well, the government has now put a stop to that, costing you again. The government has said all rent increases must now be done by Section 13. Letting agents charge around £75 to do this, which is another £6–£7 per month.

Before we even get to a small rent increase to cover all the inflationary increases in our costs, you’ve already got around £33 per month going straight to the government and council charges.

This is without the extra administration these changes create. We are now having to deal with all of this from 4am office starts through to 9pm finishes.

Unfortunately, no longer small rent increases, I’m afraid. We are looking at a minimum of around £83 per month before we even start to cover the increasing costs of running and maintaining the properties.

I could go on and on, if some media outlet would finally tell the truth and put it all out there.

The tenants who have had no problems, the 80% who have had good landlords and no issues, are the ones who are really being hit hard by all these government and council changes.

Article by Mick Roberts, one of Nottingham’s largest landlords to house benefit tenants.