Rent and Deposits
Rent
The tenants rent day will be the date that they moved into the property and we always will aim to collect rent by bank order. However, some tenants still prefer to pay by cash and we do take both credit and debit cards.
Rent Warranty
Although all tenants, including guarantors where required, are fully referenced circumstances do change, which are often beyond a tenants control, like being made redundant. To provide you with additional piece of mind, on our fully managed service we provide a free rent protection warranty on the first six months of all new tenancies.
Deposits
We will normally advise that Tenants pay 150% of one months rent as security deposit, although this may vary dependant on the Tenants circumstances. For example if they have a Dog or Cat, which you are prepared to accept we may advise an additional deposit.
All our deposits are lodged with the Deposit Protection Service (DPS) within 14 days of the Tenant moving into the property. On registration of a deposit the DPS provide both ourselves as managing agents and the tenants with unique reference numbers that are required for the deposit to be released at the end of the Tenancy. You may wish to follow the link below to the Deposit Protection Service website for more information:
https://www.depositprotection.com/Public/Legislation.aspx
No Deposit Scheme
This can be an attractive option in some circumstances, where the Tenant pays no deposit, but they purchase a Warranty Insurance that covers for up to 2 months value of rent against property repairs or damage caused by the Tenant. We have carefully checked this scheme which is run by the company who provide our tenant referencing and personally feel that it is a very good alternative to the tenant paying a deposit.
Circumstances when we see this being particularly attractive are on higher rental properties and/or where the tenant wishes to stay in the property fairly long term and are reluctant to tie up a large sum of money with a cash deposit.