Do I have a right to know who lives in my house?

Reply to the comment left by John Mac at 26/03/2021 - 11:02
At the point of sending the email your device immediately stores a copy in your Sent Items folder as well as tenants’ details as a Contact. You will need to delete both of these and also log on to your email service provider web account and detail the sent email from there as well. May only take 10 to 20 seconds to do all this but it does mean you have electronically stored your tenants details even for this very short period. And hence you would have needed to comply with GDPR for what could be a few seconds. Sorry to be even more pedantic John...... ha ha.

You certainly cannot identify anyone merely by their Name or by their email address or by their telephone number,
But you may be able to identify any individual by his or her address, and by their date of Birth, their place of Birth, so if you only store Name of a person and their phone numbers and their email addresses, you do not need to register for Data Protection as you cannot identify any person through these alone. The key word is in "Identifying " So if you see a crowd of 100 people and you know there is a person called John among them, could you pin point John in that crowd? no you may guess and your chance of getting that right would be 1 in 100.
So stop wasting your £40 to buy useless and unnecessary garbage certificate not worth the paper it is written on.

However, if you are a Landlord, you are going to possibly need to register as an individual can then be identified through the address you associate that person with and his or her name and so on, but only if you do so on an electronic medium.

The Judge will expect you to know who occupies your property and how it is occupied.
An inspection is expected in a regular basis with a written report.
This cannot continue.
You need to address this operational application of the law immediately.
Happy to assist in resolving the dispute.
Des Taylor
Casework Director
Landlords Defence Limited
0208 088 0788

That is total rubbish, you have the right by law to know who your tenants are as they are YOUR TENANTS and not the agents, in fact you have more of a right to know who they are than the agent !!

I has the similar situation with an agent and quickly found out from the NRLA and various other organisations they this was total rubbish.

You won’t believe how many agents actually are not clued up on law and get things wrong.

There is to many pieces of legislation for letting a property now that I no longer risk agents managing mine anymore as there are too many issues for them to get wrong and ultimately the book lies with the landlord !!

May I add, not all agents are the same and there are some good ones, but not many in my experience.

Just looking at this from a slightly different angle, how do the Letting Agency propose to give the contact details of your tenant to another plumber, in a way that differs from giving them to yourself? Shows that they are talking nonsense.

A mate of mine gets most of his plumbing work via Letting Agents. He has to charge more than when he does other work as he has to pay the Letting Agent a fee for getting the work. So the real reason the Letting Agent probably wants to use their own plumber is because of this fee (bung) they get from the plumber.
Of course, none of this is made clear in your contract with the Letting Agent, but in Nottingham this is a regular practice, that I guess would be illegal if anyone could be bothered to investigate it. I am guessing that it extends to other trades as well.

If you are close by enough to organise repairs or even do them yourself of course you should be liaising with the tenants and thus why do you need to be paying (15%?) an Agent to manage? Self manage it and if you can, even do the finding of tenants where you get to meet and choose who lives in YOUR property. Greater Peace of mind and more profit to YOU

Agree with all the other comments. GDPR rules allow for information to be shared where their is a legitimate reason for doing so, as in your case. I would sack your letting agent.

Reply to the comment left by Jessie Jones at 27/03/2021 - 09:25
Yes Jessie, I've found from my own and many other landlords experience that this is a regular 'strategy' that letting agents use to recoup fees they've lost out on from the Tenant Fee ban ( lost from Tenants, but recouped from Landlords )
Where I can't avoid using an Agent, I deal with any repairs direct ( which partly obviates the purpose of an agent in the first place )
What many Landlords feel, I've found is that especially if they have busy lives, they employ a landlord to take care of letting tasks that they don't have the time for.
Often, a landlord will employ an Agent because the landlord, especially if they have recently entered the business or have a small number of properties, use an Agent because they are not familiar with the plethora of regulation ( often unclear and conflicting ) that the Govt have imposed on the PRS. The danger here is if the landlord doesn't know what the Agent is supposed to be doing, how can they check the necessary actions have been carried out..
But with employing anyone, you have to do due diligence, and even after engaging them, MONITOR their performance - work.
Its this latter part that escapes so many, until the 'wheel comes off' - which is at the point they're usually talking to me.
I have had to help Landlords who have disputes with Letting Agents on many occasions.
Adding a caveat mentioned earlier, not all letting Agents are bad, you just have to be very astute to recognise the difference.

That agent sounds dodgy to me. What are they hiding ?
They may very well be sub-letting as an HMO or anything else for all you know !!
Don't mess about. Demand the details and give notice to the property of your pending visit to carry out your own inspection Then sack the agent and find a proper one.

Reply to the comment left by Chris @ Possession Friend at 27/03/2021 - 14:43
7th line down ... employ a Letting Agent, I meant, sorry.