What to do if your Letting Agent goes bust

Unfortunately, we’re hearing of more and more instances of Letting Agents going bust.

The current economic climate could be putting more and more well-intentioned companies under financial pressure. Or there may be less scrupulous, unregulated companies exploiting both landlords and tenants. Whatever the case, if this happens to your Agent it can be most distressing.

We’ve had a number of landlords come to us when this has happened to their Agent, so have come up with our “Landlord Rescue Pack.” 

Initially, we’d advise that you do the following:

1. Advise your tenant to stop paying rent to the Agent that has gone bust and be wary of any request from them to pay the rent into a different bank account than usual.
2. Go to https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company to find out the status of the company. This will help you find out who to contact if you want to peruse the company for any monies outstanding.
3. Check that the Agent has been ensuring that your managed property meets current legal compliance criteria. If you’re not sure, call us here at Readings for advice.

Start the process of instructing another Agent to act on your behalf as soon as possible. Make sure that the Agent is regulated by either RICS or ARLA Propertymark. This ensures that they have client money protection in place and suitable levels of Professional Indemnity insurance. Readings obviously ticks the boxes in both these instances!

Our “Landlord Recue Pack” involves the following:

1. We’ll review all of the paperwork associated with your property(ies) to include tenancy agreements, compliance paperwork, prescribed information, deposit protection etc.
2. We’ll contact your tenants to ensure that they don’t make any more rental payments to the old Agent and will collect the rent on your behalf.
3. We’ll arrange to visit the property to meet with the tenants and carry out an interim property visit report. We’ll then report back to you with photographic evidence of the condition of the property. This will be an ongoing process throughout the time that we manage your property.

We manage hundreds of properties in the city and county and have been around in some way, shape or form since 1935, so we must be doing something right! We’re also members of the RICS, ARLA Propertymark and The Property Ombudsman scheme. This means that you can be assured of the utmost client protection measures.

Please don’t hesitate to call us on 0116 2227575 if you have any questions.