Compliance & It’s importance for your Letting Agency
Compliance features heavily on the list of priorities for the letting agent - with health and safety matters at the forefront of the duties letting agents must deal with. However, compliance must also be taken into consideration when dealing with administrative processes, ranging from AML checks to ensuring who ownership of the property is verified.
The reasons behind having strong systems in place to ensure that a letting agent is compliant are multi-layered and can raise concern if there are gaps in the letting agents processes. For example, the introduction of the Deregulation Act 2015 (1st October 2015), changed not only the section 21 notice template in England (the Form 6A was introduced), the additional documents required to ensure validity of the notice, as well as the period during which the notice could NOT be served, caused confusion and placed great emphasis on the importance of compliance and demonstrating to a very strong audit trail.
100 Days on - What next in the Lettings Industry?
Letting Agents & Property Managers have navigated this pandemic sailing through unchartered territory. Planning, putting new procedures in place to enable WFH, redistributing workloads, and then moving back through a phased approach to the office environment has been challenging to say the least.
What happens next?
-
Tenants are legally bound to pay rent, so at this three month point, it is important to review the status of those deferred payments/agreed rent reductions. Remember, post WWII Central London Property Trust Ltd v High Trees House Ltd [1947] - the agreement to delay rent payments was NOT put in writing. Any amendment to the contract MUST be MUTUALLY agreed.
Tenant Fee Ban to become Law 1st June 2019
The last reading in the House of Lords made a few amendments to the Tenant Fee Ban Bill, but the most important announcement was that the Ban is set to become Law on the 1st June 2019.
Gratitude When You Least expect it
It's been an interesting few months for us which has been consumed by something called GDPR. We've been "working" on this for a while, making sure we are compliant and certain that everything we need to do is dealt with by the May 25th deadline.