Call our friendly team

01702 606 301

Top tips on keeping your tenants happy

What’s the secret to a successful buy to let business? It’s really quite simple. You aim to generate an optimum rental income by keeping your property let to tenants while safeguarding the structure and fabric of your business asset.

You can achieve that continuous occupation and steady rental income stream by keeping your tenants content with the accommodation (and service) you provide.

Here, we offer a few tips and suggestions for keeping your tenants happy. Some might be make or break issues, but others might be so seemingly simple you previously overlooked them.

What are your tenants looking for?

You are most likely to be keeping your tenants happy, of course, if you are giving them – as closely as possible – whatever it is they want from the home they’re renting.

If you set out to become the type of landlord who goes above and beyond what is expected, not only can you attract a tenant who will be more inclined to pay the rent that you require, but you’ll stand more chance of keeping them – you’ll find it more than worth your while to go that extra mile as a landlord.

Various sources conduct surveys from time to time asking prospective tenants about what they are looking for in a rented property. What surveys such as these tend to highlight, however, is that there is no single list of what all tenants are likely to find the most desirable.

To illustrate the point let’s consider the list of sought-after features identified by Estate Agent Today on the 31st of August 2022:

  • a safe and secure home;
  • a property that meets high energy efficiency standards;
  • a let property this well-maintained and clean; and
  • a landlord or letting agent who is both accessible and easy to talk to.

Estate and letting agents Centrick, on the other hand, published a quite different order of priorities in their posting on the 19th of May 2022:

  • the freedom to own a pet in the let property;
  • a home with outdoor space – whether this is a garden attached to the property, access to communal or shared gardens, or even a balcony;
  • space – whether indoors or outside – for exercise and fitness equipment and routines;
  • dedicated parking space; and
  • flexible furnishing options.

In other words, if you are trying to keep your tenants happy by providing the type of accommodation they want, you might be choosing from an especially long list of options. Added to that is the fact that whatever features make certain rented accommodation more desirable than others might vary from one type of tenant to another.

Flat, house or something in between?

A large flat, with several bedrooms, for example, might appeal to sharers, while a spacious house with a large garden may be preferred by a family. While older tenants are likely to be looking forward to a relatively long tenancy, younger tenants are more likely to want to move on (because they move jobs or want to buy their own home, for example).

Despite some differences across age groups, however, most of your tenants are likely to expect to continue renting. In terms of delivering what tenants want, therefore, you might want to gear your buy to let business towards longer-term tenancies – a win for tenants, but also a win for you since it leads to fewer voids.

As you delve into questions about tenants’ likes and dislikes it becomes ever clearer that you are unlikely to keep everyone happy by meeting all of their preferences. So much depends, of course, on the type of property you are looking to let.

The landlord-tenant relationship

With those realities firmly in mind, it may be worth looking at some of the ways you can ensure that you start as you mean to go on by building an appropriate landlord-tenant relationship – one of the bases on which you may be able to help keep your tenants happy:

Moving in pack

  • when your tenant moves in, one of the documents you are legally obliged to provide is a copy of the government’s current How to Rent guide – which focuses mainly on the respective responsibilities and obligations of both landlord and tenant;
  • but why not also give them a pack that tells them all they need to know about your particular property – how to operate the central heating controls, for example, or the days of the week the rubbish needs to go out;
  • other useful information might be where they can find the nearest vet – or even phone numbers of the local takeaways;
  • welcome packs such as these might make your tenants feel comfortable and show that you are a committed landlord;

Spring clean

  • thoroughly spring clean your let property before new tenants move in;
  • this underlines the importance you attach to your tenants treating your property with the respect and care it deserves – and presents the accommodation in the state you want it to be left in when the tenancy finally comes to an end;
  • a thorough spring cleaning will also provide the baseline on which your inventory is based;
  • the inventory needs to be detailed – and illustrated by photographs where appropriate – both agreed and signed by you and your tenants;
  • the inventory – and the tenancy agreement itself – should spell out responsibilities for maintenance of the garden, if there is one;

Contact details

  • even if your property is managed by agents, do give your tenant some way of contacting you if things fail to get done – perhaps by email;
  • even when it is the managing agent’s responsibility to look after your tenant, some may not treat your client as a priority – and, ultimately, this reflects badly on you;
  • if you self-manage your property and you can afford it, you may want to consider investing in a domestic emergency insurance policy, so that your tenant – and you – have the reassurance that should something happen (the central heating boiler fails, for example) it will get rectified as soon as possible;
  • this shows your tenant that you value them as well as stopping you from getting a phone call in the middle of the night if something goes wrong;
  • of course, while you are doing all this, you mustn’t forget that you are running a business so make sure you have appropriate let property insurance, and do keep a record of things, whether it is a schedule of repairs, conversations about the property, and so on – start the relationship as you mean to go on.

Being friendly yet professional with your tenant costs nothing and going that extra mile can make all the difference between keeping a long-term tenant or having a high turnover of tenants.

What is the tenancy deposit protection (TDP) scheme?

One of the areas over which tenants may have taken issue with landlords in the past was the payment – or more importantly the return – of the deposit they were required to pay against the possibility of rental arrears, breakages, or damage.

Since 2007, all assured shorthold tenancies – that is to say, the majority of all tenancies – have required the landlord to place any such security deposit into an approved scheme for safekeeping within 30 days of receiving the money. Lettings agents are under the same obligation to secure any deposit received on behalf of the landlord.

There are separate TDP schemes in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Not only does the tenancy deposit protection scheme provide safekeeping for the monies paid over by your tenant but, in the event, of any dispute about the amount to be repaid at the conclusion of a tenancy, an arbitration procedure is available to help resolve matters.

With effect from the 1st of June 2019 (in England only), the maximum deposit you can charge any new tenant on an assured shorthold tenancy is five times the effective weekly rent – or the equivalent of six weeks’ rent if your tenant pays you more than £50,000 a year in rent.

Summary

Keeping a good tenant can save you time, money, and hassle. We hope these pointers have given you food for thought as to how to keep your tenants happy.

This entry was posted in Landlord Business. Bookmark the permalink.