Legal action to recover rent arrears - UK

Re: Legal actions not helpful to recover rent arrears

This is an Irish forum, so you may not be able to get answers to your questions here.

I sympathise with you, I had the same situation with a tenant in London and even though we employed an agency to track them down after they left, the bailiff was only able to recover the cost of the court order - I would have had to go back to court to enforce the rest. We ended up around £5,000 out of pocket plus they wrecked the house before they left.

Tenancy laws in the UK are heavily weighted in favour of the tenant, leaving the landlord open to much abuse.

Looks like you'll have to go back to your solicitor.

In the past I have used a law outfit called "landlord action" to deal with problem tenants. They are a bit better than normal law firms in this regard as they tend to specialise in this area and know what they are talking about. However previous poster is correct in saying that the law in UK favours bad tenants, and you are sometimes better off forgetting about getting ripped off. You will have to pay for legal costs up front and it may be a case of throwing good money after bad.

An additional problem in the UK is the social workers attached to local councils, who tend to support bad or defaulting tenants in their disputes with landlords. The view in all official circles is that the landlord is automatically the bad guy, and the tenant is right until proved otherwise.

If you have lost money, best advice is to forget it and make sure you don't get caught again. Have good deposits and guarantors in place before taking in tenants. Mostly, never ever take DSS tenants, they will cause you nothing but trouble; much cheaper to leave a property empty.

As mentioned by auto320, [broken link removed] may be an option for you.

They took part in an ITV documentary 'Tenants from Hell' in July 2006 and appeared to be very successful in evicting tenants and recovering costs.

I wish they had been around when I had my problem in London.

While Landlord Action are better than most law firms in this area, nobody should think that they have all the answers either. I have seen defaulting tenants "playing the game" with the assistance of social workers, in order to avoid paying rent and to get themselves evicted so as to get higher up on the housing list. In some cases it can take about a year to get them out, with no way around that. They go to court with free legal aid and a herd of social workers in tow, and then when the landlord gets his order they immediately appeal it; they can not be evicted while the appeal is pending. It doesn't cost them anything to submit the appeal, free legal aid again pays their bills, but the landlord has to pay up front for barristers etc. in respect of the appeal, as well as the costs on the day in court. It is very rare that the judge will give an order for the landlord's costs, and in any case it may be a case of chasing someone of no net worth.

Best way to avoid such troubles as I said in previous post is to be very discriminating on the day you let the house. Make sure that you are well covered by deposit and an independent guarantor that you have checked out. Also check out employer references -- don't just ring the number provided by the tenant, look up the company in the yellow pages and ring the number you see there! I did this once, and the company had never heard of the prospective tenant -- she had given me a friend's number in a crude attempt to prove that she was working, when in fact she was unemployed and would have involved me with the DSS and all the problems that go with that. At the first sign of delays with the rent, often in month 2 when the tenant tries to absorb the deposit in the second month's rent, serve notice and chuck them out. Might sound hard-hearted, but you have a lot of money invested in the property and you need to protect it.