Changes to let only services

We are always seeking to streamline our services, and remove any friction points to make the experience you have the smoothest possible.

We have identified that our tenant find service can be improved.

To this end, we are introducing a major change for the 2020 rental season that will affect Let Only landlords.  These are landlords that use our services purely to source tenants, and we don’t have any involvement in rent collections, maintenance, checkouts or inspections.  

For managed landlords, this change will free up our resources to deal with your managed property better, but will not have any material impact on how we look after your property.

The change will affect how we collect our fee from let only landlords for our services. The current arrangement for all let only landlords is we collect the first full months rent, and deduct our fee from it. We also currently take deposit money and protect it, and transfer it to the let only landlord.  In practice this means let only landlords rent from the tenants direct for July and August, and have to wait for our payment cycle at the end of each month, and are generally paid the balance of rent (after fees are deducted) at the end of August.

The new system for let only landlords will be we carry out the tenant find as normal, and on completion of all contract paperwork, we invoice let only landllords for the work done. On settling of the invoice we then hand over all contract documentation and tenant information. Let only landlords will be responsible for taking deposit payments and protecting within the DPS as well as taking rental payments.

This has clear benefits to let only landlords:

• They receive your rent during July and August as normal, with no reduction in income over summer (beyond the usual drop to 50% for July/August).
• They know the deposit protection is compliant as you control it
• The relationship with the tenants is cemented early, meaning a better experience for the tenants (rather than finding out much later that you are self-managing the house)
• They have a clear handover point after which you are in full control of the landlord/tenant relationship.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to let me know at simon.topple@topproperty-services.com