Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially in property

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  If we had known how every successive generation was going to hold us up to ridicule we would not have dressed like that in the 1970’s, we would not have paid good money for Mullet haircuts in the 1980’s and we certainly would never have taken out an endowment mortgage.

The world is full of people ruing decisions they made which had a serious negative impact on their future.

In an ideal world, every decision we made would be an informed one but all too often, we have to make those decisions based on very little information and with fingers tightly crossed.

Crystal ball

The property letting industry is particularly well populated by those who would have happily sold their grandmothers for a crystal ball.

Handing over the keys to a new tenant is always a risk and there is little worse for a letting agent, landlord or local authority to find out that the risk they took has turned into a fully fledged nightmare.

Take the landlord in London who had to go to court to get more than £90,000 in outstanding rent from one tenant.

Then there was the person who decided to turn their rented property into an animal sanctuary with more than 60 “guests” many of which were doubtless unfamiliar with the term “house trained”. It cost the landlord a fortune to clean the house up.

For those who are not keen on reptiles, you may wish to spare a thought for the landlord who went back into his property following an eviction only to find a gigantic snake curled up on the floor just inside the front door. It had also left its scales and a very distinctive “aroma” all over the house.

Theft and damage

There is also the problem of not being able to nail everything down. One landlord discovered not only had her tenants suddenly vanished but so had her greenhouse and garden furniture.

Some tenants leave, taking fixtures and fittings with them, others simply trash the property – in some instances, simply for recreation.

And of course there are those like the French tenant who kept wild pigeons in his rented property. Not only did he stop paying rent – he refused to leave and it took the landlords a year and several thousand pounds to eventually get the tenant out.

Stress

It is not just the monetary cost of terrible tenants, it is also enormously stressful having to deal  with them, especially if legal proceedings and court appearances are necessary.

That is why the lettings community is embracing a new initiative which gives them the gift of hindsight and enables them to look at the past record of prospective clients.

TenantID, launched March 7th,  is a sophisticated database which carries invaluable but easy to access information about tenants – in particular, whether they have a history of non payment, damage or breaching tenancy agreements.  TenantID is encouraging everyone in the lettings industry, agents, landlords and local authorities to sign up and put a few simple facts about all of their tenants into the system.

By being able to find out at the touch of a button whether someone is reliable or has a track record of trouble will enable those who make their living out of renting properties to make informed decisions and sleep much easier in their beds.

Thank you to Chris Birdsall of TenantID.co.uk for sharing this Blog.  To find out more about Tenant ID please just click the logo below to visit their web-site

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