International Law

Malcolm reversed

Posted on June 26, 2008
Landlords the length and breadth of the country will (or should) be celebrating the House of Lords decision in the leading case of Lewisham v. Malcolm, (discussed by me previously here) and the reversal of the previous Court of Appeal decision. This denied Lewisham a possession order on the basis that Mr Malcolm?s subletting of his flat (which in normal cases would have entitled Lewisham to an order for possession without question) was as a result of his disability (schizophrenia), and that their claim for possession was therefore discriminatory...

Councils get tough on HMO regulation evaders

Posted on June 25, 2008
I have just seen two reports of landlords breaching the HMO regulations being fined.In Redditch, Nadeem Asghar, (23), pleaded guilty to operating a house in multiple occupation and was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay £1,071 costs.In Loughborough Mohammed Tayaib Ali Chowdhury (age not given in the report) was fined a swinging £10,000 and £1,015 costs...

More tenants evicted by landlords mortgagees

Posted on June 05, 2008
I have been contacted by another tenant today, who is being evicted by her landlords mortgage company. Her situation is not quite as bad as that of my clients in my previous post, as no order for possession has been made yet (the hearing is in July)...

Stand your ground on damage deposit claims

Posted on May 19, 2008
In my last post I talked about the case of my poor clients, evicted by their landlords? mortgagee. In fact the situation was worse that I let on, as not only were they evicted, they also didn?t get their deposit back! My advice to them was (inter alia) to threaten the agents with an application under the Tenancy Deposit Protection Scheme regulations for the return of the deposit and three times the deposit sum ?fine? provided for under the regs...

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Agents letting property subject to a re-possession order

Posted on May 12, 2008
There is quite a lot of discussion about tenants evicted unfairly by landlords in retaliation for something that they have done, such as complain about repairs. However there is another type of unfair eviction where tenants do not even get the benefit of the two months notice under section 21 which tenants receive in a retaliatory eviction...

Inside track bubble bursts

Posted on May 05, 2008
I was amused to read that Inside Track, the company that charged thousands of pounds for courses promising to teach people how to be property millionaires, has now itself gone into administration.I am not a property investor myself, neither am I a millionaire (I wish!) but I would have thought that if people want to make money from property, something along the following lines would be necessary:To be clever (particularly to understand numbers and finance) and to have a large chunk of common senseTo read around the subject (for example some of the books here) and attend talks and lectures (no need to spend thousands, for example there are free talks at property events such as the Landlord and Buy to Let Shows, and David Lawrenson runs modestly priced property seminars in London)To study the property market very, very carefully in a specific area of the country, ideally not too far from where you live, so you know it really well and can buy sensiblyCapitalI suspect that good people skills and contacts in the building industry would also be important...

The problem of landlord regulation

Posted on May 04, 2008
A recent article in Inside Housing looks at how landlords are using the governments review of the private rented sector to call for a review of the HMO licensing system, which they say is not working. One organisation is asking for it to be done away with altogether, allowing landlords to ?self regulate?...

Credit crunch problems

Posted on April 23, 2008
There is a very interesting, if worrying, article on the Guardian site here about the credit crunch and the effect it is having on housing. I was shocked to read that mortgage repossessions are likely to go up to 45,000, from 8,000 in 2004. The article also makes other telling points, such as for example the income of support charities is likely to go down as few people can afford to donate, and the value of their investments plummet...

The Rent Arrears Action Plan

Posted on April 23, 2008
In view of the current financial situation, I have added a new members only service to my Landlord-Law site, a Rent Arrears Action Plan. This is in five parts (the first part being preliminary information) and contains detailed guidance to landlords on what they should do from the moment their tenant first falls into arrears, up to considering court action...

Local authority takes action on illegal HMOs

Posted on April 20, 2008
I was pleased to read in this report that in Kings Lynn, Local Authority officials are checking up on HMOs. There is not much point in having laws to legislate HMOs, poor conditions in property, and the like if nothing is done about it.As was pointed out by Mark P in the comment here (you need to scroll down), many Local Authorities are unable to do anything due to lack of funds, so it is good to see that are taking their responsibilities seriously...

Policing the Landlords

Posted on April 07, 2008
I have just listened to an interesting program on Radio 4 (via the listen again facility) which is on problems tenants at the lower end of the market experience. The presenter finally managed to speak to one of the landlords whose properties featured in the program, who took the view that he was spending loads of money doing up properties for ?scumbags?, who then don?t look after them properly (leading, he implied, to the condition the presenter found them in)...

Bernstein and Floyd

Posted on April 06, 2008
Readers who were interested in my earlier post on the landlord whose disabled tenant appealed against a possession order obtained under s21, will be interested in this quote from the final paragraph in the report in the recent case of S -v- Floyd (with the Equality and Human Rights Commission joined in as an interested party):one of the members of this court has dealt recently with an application for permission to appeal from a judgment of a Circuit Judge (Bernstein v Tate, December 21, 2007) in a case involving what would normally be a mandatory order for possession under section 21 of the 1988 Act...

OFT challenges unfair terms in landlords agency agreements

Posted on February 28, 2008
Landlords nationwide will be delighted at the action being taken by the Office of Fair Trading, regarding letting agents Foxton?s agency terms and conditions. Under these agency agreements, Foxtons claim commission from landlords for tenants found by them when the tenant stays on after the end of the tenancy agreement, even if they (ie Foxtons) are no longer involved in the management of the property, and even if the landlord has sold the property! (In which case the landlord would not be receiving any benefit from the tenant at all...

More on the new tenancy agreements

Posted on February 23, 2008
Still working on the new plain English tenancy agreements for Landlord-Law. I had a fair few responses to my consultation and the responses were (one the whole) gratifyingly positive. No-one said that they definitely didn?t like the new version (there were just a couple of not sure?s), and the main criticism was that it would take up more paper...

Plain English tenancy agreements

Posted on February 10, 2008
I haven?t been writing much in the blog recently because I have been doing a lot of other stuff. One the main things I have been concentrating on recently is a new draft of my standard tenancy agreement. I was going to give it an overhaul anyway, then I got involved with a client who wanted one of my agreements to be checked for a crystal mark, and I decided to use this experience to amend and adapt my own agreements to a plain English format...

More problems at the county court

Posted on January 27, 2008
I have written in the past about problems with the courts. That was about a court order having the wrong court details. In the past few weeks I have had, not only a further instance of the court / order mixup, but two very serious errors in the text of orders sent out to me...

New year, new ideas, new courses

Posted on January 16, 2008
I have spent much of the past couple of weeks developing and organizing new courses for our training company. The first course is fairly straightforward. It is on the new Local Housing Allowance. It will take place in Norwich in March and will be given by Mr John Booty, former housing benefit manager at Ipswich Borough Council...

Merry Christmas, see you in the New Year

Posted on December 23, 2007
Sorry about the break in transmission folks. My muse has been busy with other things recently, but hopefully will be back on the blog job in the new year.In the meantime, I wish you readers all the best for the Christmas holiday, followed by a happy and prosperous new year.

Tenancy agreement terms causing problems for local authority

Posted on November 22, 2007
A friend of mine who sits as a Deputy District Judge told me of an interesting case recently. Apparently a local authority tenant had moved out of his rented property, thereby losing his security of tenure and making his tenancy a common law one. The landlords had therefore served a notice to quit (as this is the appropriate notice for common law tenancies) and sought possession of the property...

HMOs again

Posted on November 13, 2007
I have seen a couple of reports recently on the internet (here and here) saying that a study by Heritable Bank has recommended that the HMO system be reviewed, as there is such a wide discrepancy between the license fees charged by different local authorities, and also a wide variation in the way they deal with licensing generally...

The good, the bad, and the exhausting

Posted on November 11, 2007
I am just recovering from an exhausting week. Thursday saw the first course we have run via our training company Legal Professional Training Ltd. It was a good day, but involved a huge amount of work and administration, and left me feeling like the proverbial limp dishrag...

Local Housing Allowances ? Credit Unions to the rescue

Posted on October 19, 2007
The Local Housing Allowance Scheme, discussed in my earlier article regarding landlords from Blackpool, is due to be rolled out across the country in 2008. The main criticism from landlords is that under the new scheme the rent cannot be paid to them direct any more...

Oxford City Council to extend HMO licensing scheme

Posted on October 18, 2007
Landlords in Oxford who let to three or more unrelated tenants who share amenities (i.e. bathroom, toilet, kitchen and living space) beware! Your city council is seeking to extending the current mandatory licensing scheme (which just applies to the larger properties of three or more stories and five or more occupiers in two or more households) to all HMOs...

Pathfinder scheme criticized in Blackpool

Posted on October 13, 2007
There is an interesting article here on the new government ?pathfinder scheme? for the payment of housing benefit. This was initially set up in 2003 in a few pilot areas and is gradually being rolled out across the country. A fixed rate of benefit, known as a local housing allowance, is paid for all properties of the same type, and which is not linked to individual rents...

Tenant defending s21 claim under the DDA 1995

Posted on October 11, 2007
Readers may be interested to learn that I have been contacted by a landlord who tells me that his tenant is defending, or rather seeking to overturn, a possession order obtained via the accelerated procedure under section 21, under the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995...

More on Equality

Posted on October 09, 2007
Following on from my previous item on the Equality website, I was interested to see this item in the Times Law section today on John Wadham who is heading up the new Equality and Human Rights Commission.This article makes the point that the new commission not only covers areas of law formerly dealt with by three separate commissions, it also has a budget to enforce the Human Rights Act...

The new Equality web-site

Posted on October 05, 2007
While doing some writing for Landlord-Law I discovered that the new Equality Web-site is live. This was set up by the Equality Act 2006 which also set up a new Equality and Human Rights Commission. This will deal with discrimination over all areas, rather than, as before, just concentrating on specific areas such as race, and disability...

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

Posted on September 30, 2007
I did my Q&A this morning, something I do every other Sunday morning, and which see I wrote about nearly a year ago on this blog. I always get far more questions than the 10 that get answered (I had 32 today I think) and the same old questions still keep cropping up...

Two months rent in advance is not the same as a damage deposit

Posted on September 21, 2007
When I wrote about tenancy deposit protection avoidance earlier this year, I did not mention one other option which I understand is being taken up by many landlords ? that of taking no deposit, but two months rent in advance instead of one month.Although there is nothing wrong with this, and superficially it seems the same, as very often the tenant will be paying the same amount of money in advance, in fact the landlord will not be protected against damage in the same way as he will by taking a damage deposit...

Hands across the Pond

Posted on September 21, 2007
If anyone is interested in why I became a sole practitioner and then went on to develop my online service, see this post which I wrote for American lawyer and blogger Susan Cartier Liebel. Susan has developed a consultancy helping American lawyers who are tired of ?big law? and want a life, to go solo.

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