Three landlords face financial ruin on – Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlord

Three landlords face financial ruin on – Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlord

11:50 AM, 29th June 2015, About 10 years ago 2

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Paul Shamplina

Paul Shamplina

The second episode of Channel 5’s ‘Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords’, due to air on Wednesday 1st July 2015 at 9pm, will feature three separate landlords all facing financial ruin as a result of troublesome tenants. Calling on the expert help of Landlord Action to help regain possession of their property and chase outstanding arrears, Founder Paul Shamplina uncovers the stark reality of tenancies gone wrong.

The leading story follows builder Franc Coutinho, who has been renting his property out in North London for six years without a problem until his latest tenant, Shuaghxi Fu, moved in. Within six weeks, problems with paying the rent began with the tenant reporting false issues with the boiler to avoid paying rent. Despite numerous visits by plumbers to the property, when rent was due, the boiler mysteriously stopped working. Unable to take anymore and facing financial ruin, Franc starts the eviction process. However, when his day in court arrives, Shuaghxi Fu makes a surprise show, files a last minute defence – again about the faulty boiler – and delays the eviction by months.
Commenting on the case, Mr Shamplina says “Sadly we see far too many cases like this. It is one of the many reasons we have fought so hard to prevent law changes in relation to retaliation eviction because we fear we will see more and more cases like this if tenants are able to use delay tactics by reporting bogus issues of disrepair. Upon checking out the property it was clear there was nothing wrong with the boiler but the delay at court meant poor Franc was left with months of unpaid rent and legal fees. Having to pay two mortgages he was on the brink of bankruptcy.”

The episode’s second case features landlord Dipan Doshi who has been renting his flat out to a family of four for 18 months but for the past year has barely received a penny in rent, and is now owed over £12,000. With a wife on maternity leave, he can’t just walk away from this amount of money, so starts the ball rolling in getting the money and his property back.

Finally, after been out of pocket to the tune of £7000 in unpaid rent, landlord Louise McKinlay finally gets her tenant evicted, but once she’s in the property she finds that just because the tenant’s gone, doesn’t mean that’s the end of the nightmare.

Catch Landlord Action fighting to regain possession of these landlords’ properties on Wednesday 1st July on Channel 5 at 9pm.

Contact Landlord Action

Specialists in tenant eviction and debt collection. Regulated by The Law Society.


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Comments

Dr Rosalind Beck

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15:29 PM, 2nd July 2015, About 10 years ago

Hi. I thought the best thing about the latest episode was that we could see how upset 'Franc' was - how he couldn't sleep, how it made him feel so awful, how it was sending him a bit around the bend. I think this is the most important thing to show - the toll that these situations take on people is dreadful and the general public doesn't know or maybe care about this, as they are too busy demonising landlords (until they maybe let out a house themselves and can then see the awful emotional, psychological and financial consequences of being cheated by people, who as Franc says are 'shameless').
I was less pleased with the portrayal of the bad landlords (surprise, surprise) - especially as we are shown filthy houses with terrible mould, but we can also see dreadful mess which would not be the landlords' fault. Indeed, in the first programme the tenant lived rent-free in London for 6 months - I think she preferred to do that and moan about the state of the house than be re-housed and then have no excuse for not paying the rent. We get no follow-up, so we don't know if she then does pay her rent in her new place and we don't know if she had a history in the past of not paying her rent. There are a lot of things we don't know. And this is because not enough questions are asked in the programme.. We did not know last night if the tenant 'Les' paid his rent or not. We knew nothing about his relationship with his landlord. He clearly was not a very tidy tenant either. The mould shown was horrendous, but I would have liked a scientific explanation of how mould is formed and something about a tenant's role in ventilating the house. This was lazy journalism I'm afraid.
But Paul did very well and the programme on the whole is at least showing some of the landlords' versions of events. This kind of consciousness-raising has to be good for us landlords.

Graham Durkin

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18:25 PM, 4th July 2015, About 10 years ago

A really interesting programme, but I cannot understand how these landlords appear to just write off their losses. The guy called Dipan Doshi had plenty of time to issue a section 8 for non payment of rent ,he also allowed others not on the Tenancy to live at the property ,why didn,t he follow the tenant to establish her place of work in the financial sector as soon as the problems started to appear ,this would have allowed him the opportunity to challenge her when the debt was considerably lower and i would have taken the BANKRUPTCY route to get my money that was owed ,And finally when the father went to him to give him the keys back ,he just basically said thanks .I,m sorry to say that this won,t be the first time that he gets seen off . I had the same issue once with a tenant ,got up early every day ,parked my car at a covienient point and waited for his car to pass and within a week i found out where his new job was and his new address and the rest is history.why not ask his mates to assist in the tracking process. also the guy with the damp flat ,the authoritys didn,t challenge him at all about his life style and did he ventilate the flat ,just went straight for the landlord as the guilty party.

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