Landlord compliance is an absolutely essential part of renting property no matter what your business model is. If you are developing property, renovating or converting with the intention that the property will be let or sold to somebody who will let it, then compliance has to become your number one aim and factored into every project large and small.
Over the last 10 years, there have been more than 540 new regulations or pieces of legislation for landlords to deal with; that is in excess of one new matter to contend with every single week for the last 10 years.
It begs the question “which one did you learn last week?”
All the rage is the abolition of section 21 under the Renters Reform Bill and this seems to be the biggest worry for most people who are acting as landlords or agents issuing assured shorthold tenancies. Of course, there are the issues being presented other than the eviction process and that is the tenure that each tenancy will have and what will be the process to deal with that.
The Renters Reform Bill presents many matters for landlords to address and after years of tenants and local authorities chasing landlords and using the law against them, this is a serious moment. Often the pursuit of landlords is sometimes justified and most often it is because of mistakes made through a misunderstanding of the processes and legislation.
Compliance means many things to many people and under the Renters Reform Bill it will be far ranging in its enforcement of compliance, not only of that which already exists from the Housing and Planning Act 2016, it will also encompass enforcement as a statutory duty for the local housing authority in a number of other areas for which currently it has few options to enforce through the magistrates court or to advise tenants to seek redress through the court process.
What will become evidently clear as this legislation moves forward is that enforcement will come in the way of financial penalties against landlords who currently in many areas can only be enforced against through proceedings in the magistrates court and in conjunction with the tenant.
