What to do when your tenant is in arrears

You buy your property, you put a tenant in and take their first month’s rent, you check your bank account a month later and…nothing.

Your tenant has fallen into arrears…and how you handle it could make the difference between a swift resolution and months with no income. In this episode, we take you step-by-step through the process of dealing with every investor’s nightmare scenario.

We discuss:

• How to handle those first few days when the rent hasn’t arrived as expected
• The importance of fulfilling your obligations in case you need to take legal action
• The specialist help that’s on offer (two examples are Landlord Action and Evicthem)
• The two legal routes that you need to choose between to get the tenant out and recover the arrears
• What the court process involves, step-by-step, and how long you can expect it to take

Resource of the week

If you’re anything like Rob B, your wallet is bulging with receipts rather than banknotes – and you’re either letting expenses go unclaimed, or having to buy your bookkeeper one heck of a Christmas present.

Luckily, Receipt Bank can come to your rescue: all you need to do is take a photo of the receipt on your phone, and it’ll store it securely for you. It’ll even extract all the key data ready for automatic uploading to your cloud accounts package like Sage, Xero or Kashflow.

The best thing is the easier the process of dealing with your receipts is, the more likely you are to actually do it – which means you won’t be paying too much tax as a result of overlooking legitimate expenses.

News this week

Buy-to-let mortgage rates are falling in response to the slowdown in lending demand after the stamp duty increase – and more lenders have been cutting their rates in the wake of the EU referendum.

Not only that, but the Bank of England has relaxed capital requirements for banks – freeing up £150 billion of potential funding for lending.

What does this mean? Well, cheap and easy money tends to mean higher asset prices as the funds have to go somewhere – and it also means that the lessons of the previous crash have been forgotten. This is exactly what the property cycle tells us should happen – so once we come out of the mid-cycle dip, we know what’s meant to happen next…