It's not very often these days that something stops me in my tracks, but something did this week.

I was discussing our services at our Wolverhampton office with a landlord who has been renting properties since the 1970's by himself. He showed me the tenancy agreement he had been using and asked if we could do a better one, I can honestly say I was floored.

I had never seen an agreement so out of date. He had acquired it somewhere in the mid-90's and just photocopied over and over again, to the point where it was almost unfathomable. But more worrying was the fact that it was missing some really key elements. Firstly, there was no reference to deposit protection or prescribed terms; well why would there be? There was reference to the grounds for possession, but it did not mention ground 17 for false statement or 14a. However, it did make reference to the previous issuing of a section 20 (for those of us not old enough to remember these, this is what had to be served before entering an Assured Shorthold Tenancy before the 1996, revisions) so what I was looking at was something from around 1995.

But this made me think...how many landlords out there are doing this, using out of date agreements for their tenancies?