Yes absolutely, our experienced property Hosts can be present at the handover on your behalf to receive keys and a demonstration guide tour of the property from the developer’s customer service team.

We also have several trusted, professional snagging inspectors for this purpose who will be able to assess and report back on any fixes that need to be made by the developer after handover.

We will track these issues on our maintenance system, similar to how we will do later for tenant-raised maintenance issues, and ensure that the developer’s team resolve all snagging issues to your satisfaction.

To be in compliance with UK government and UK property industry regulations, and for our due diligence to prevent identify fraud, we require some documents from you if you. This will apply equally whether you are:

• the legal Owner of the propertyor
• you are authorised to represent the legal Owner (e.g. you are the director, or secretary, of a company that is the legal Owner of the rental property)

To be in compliance with UK government and UK property industry regulations, and for our due diligence to prevent identify fraud, we require the following from the legal Owner of the property, or alternatively the authorised representative of the legal Owner:

– passport (showing full legal name, photo, and date of birth)

– proof of address (a recent utility bill or bank statement showing the full legal name and permanent home address)

Any proof of ownership document must, at the very least, correctly state both of the following pieces of information:

– the address, or plot number, of the property

– the legal name(s) of the Owner(s) of the property

Any one of the following most common proof of ownership documents can suffice:

– title register — found on the UK Land Registry website. However, this is often difficult to find for new build properties, as there can be a delay of many months between property completion and the Land Registry website being updated. Your solicitor should ensure that, for their part, the Land Registry is given the necessary information and instruction to update the public record online as soon as possible after completion of the property sale.

– sales and purchase agreement (or share purchase agreement, as the case may be)

– property transfer deed

– mortgage statement (issued in the last 3 months)

– exchanged contract

– property completion statement

– a formal headed letter related to the property ownership transfer (e.g. from a solicitor or property developer)

We will remit the rent to you in accordance with your instructions and as appropriate for the rent payment schedule agreed in the rental contract. In many cases, the rent will be payable monthly, and you can expect to receive the monies in your account a few working days after the rent due date.

We will agree with you the amount of rent monies we may need to hold on account for you, as a float to bear maintenance expenses, service charge and ground rent costs, and similar.

We usually only remit rent payments to UK bank accounts. This is to avoid risk of lost payments, delays in transmitting payments, exchange-rate risks, and high international transmission costs. If an international bank transfer payment cannot be avoided for you, there will be an additional charge for that, as detailed above on this page.

Yes, you need to pay tax on rental income received for any rental property located in the UK, this is true even if you as the legal Owner do not reside in the UK.

This guide on the UK government website explains your rent remittance and tax options further.

Once you have decided to choose this option of receiving the full rent untaxed by us, you will need to fill out an NRL1i form and send it to HMRC. This is an application form to join the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme (NRLS). They will process your application. If your NRLS application approved, HMRC will contact us to authorise the full rent to be remitted to you.

You will then need to be aware of the self assessment tax return procedure and ensure HMRC is paid the correct amount of tax by you.

Now that you have decided to choose this option, the next step is to confirm this instruction by email to your Account Manager, for our records.

Our Accounts Team will then proceed to deduct tax at the basic rate from your rental income, and then remit the balance to you. For these purposes, “rental income” does not include the costs of property maintenance expenses. The amount of your rental income that is spent on such maintenance is not taxable.

We take all necessary and sensible measures to ensure that the tenants we find for you are financially worthy of undertaking the rental contract commitments.

Unfortunately there may be unexpected circumstances that occur which could affect a tenant’s ability to pay rent. Our Accounts Team will be monitoring the rents receivable at any given time, and if there is a late payment, we will contact the tenant urgently to investigate why the payment is late. We will then feed back to you any points of concern. If there is a risk of this being a continuing problem, we will use all practical and legal means to obtain the money owed, including debt collection procedures and money claims court filings.

To best protect yourself against income losses, we highly recommend all Owners to purchase rent insurance policies – see our Owner Fees guide for more details.

RentLondonFlat.com is our dedicated rental platform built to find you the best tenants. We have our own database of renters and subscribers sourced through our website, whom we regularly furnish with rental offers on the best new and upcoming residential developments in London,  with lifestyle guides, and so forth. These are curated databases of professional tenants and students.

Furthermore, we continually refresh this database by capturing new enquiries from the most popular and respected rental portals in the UK, to keep abreast of the constant inflowing population of renters in the big UK cities. Once we have potential renters interested and making offers, we will present them to you for approval, after which we will use income and credit checks, employer or university checks, and previous landlord/rental agency reference checks, to ensure that they are suitable candidates to which you may hand over your property.

Our property Hosts will instruct tenants in person during the move-in inspection on the pertinent building procedures, e.g. pertaining to fob access doors, parking, etc. Our Tenancies Team will also be on hand in addition to the Host during the tenancy to assist with tenant queries about building protocols.

If there is a concierge or other on-site building staff presence associated with your property, they will also be made aware of the tenant moving in, and will be able to guide on a day-to-day basis.

The rental contract you sign with the tenant will oblige the tenant to follow all necessary building regulations. in the same manner that you would as the Owner if you were living in the property yourself. You will not have to bear the cost of any fines that may possibly arise as a result of tenant breaches of the building rules. That cost will be borne by the tenant through deductions from their security deposit.

Our database of trusted contractors contains a variety of tradesmen that we can call upon depending on the job required. These contractors have been personally sourced over many decades of property management experience in our team — many of our senior team have been landlords in the UK for decades.

Furthermore, our team continually refresh and review our trusted contractor database by scouring websites such as Checkatrade, TaskRabbit, MyBuilder, etc., to ensure that the cost of jobs, and quality of work done, meets market standards. Our goal is always to ensure that you as an Owner get the best deals for any necessary maintenance work to your property.

Tenants will raise maintenance concerns via our online Guest Help Form found at rentlondonflat.com/help.

The Guest Help Form, along with the FAQs for tenants on our website, are designed to first guide the tenant to think about resolving the issue by themselves, especially if it is a relatively simple issue, and/or it is their contractual responsibility to fix. We present online written guides as well as demo videos to assist the tenant fix the issue themselves.

If we find that the tenant is not best placed to fix the issue, we will notify you via email about the issue, and the proposed steps to resolve it, this will include a rough initial estimate of the costs involved, for example for any contractor investigation/assesment visit.

This type of consultation is our aim for non-emergency maintenance issues, but this is not possible for emergency situations. In such emergency situations, we will act to do the needful as well as informing you ASAP afterwards of what has taken place. This is because there will be no other choice but to incur an expense due to the nature of the issue. For example, quick action may be mandated as a legal health and safety requirement, or for instance to protect the security of the property or neighbouring properties against further severe damage.

Such emergency maintenance situations may include:

– fire hazard
– gas leak
– electricity (power or safety) failure
– room heating failure
– water heating failure
– door or window is unsecure e.g. lock broken
– continuous and severe water leak damaging your property and/or neighbouring properties

We will update you regularly via email during the process of investigating and resolving a maintenance issue. This will include confirmation of expenses incurred, and before and after photos/videos of the works done. These media will be kept by us on record to supplement the move-in and move-out inspection reports.

As an Owner-occupier, you will have taken out home insurance.

If you then wish to change from living in the property yourself, to renting out that property, you will need to change your insurance policy (from home insurance to landlord insurance).

Or if you buy a property never intending to live in it, but purely for investment and to rent it out, then it is also advisable to take out landlord insurance.

Landlord insurance policies vary, but would often include cover for :

– loss of rent
– cost of alternative temporary accommodation for the tenant in case the property becomes uninhabitable
– cost of making good malicious damage to the property inflicting by the tenant
– cost of liability for injuries or other losses suffered by a third-person in your property (e.g. building staff, contractor, etc.)
– cost of legal expenses related to tenant eviction

Items such as these are not covered in home insurance policies.

Yes we would advise you to purchase landlord insurance, indeed the purchase of such a policy may be obligated by your mortgage provider for example.

We will speak to the parties involved (tenant, neighbour, and any building staff) on your behalf and gather the facts before discussing the situation with you. If it cannot be resolved through easy mediation, depending on the nature of the complaint and who is responsible, there may be a need to involve the local authorities – e.g. council, or community safety partnership with links to the local police.

During viewings, the property Host will do a cursory sweep of the property to spot any potential points of concern. For a year-long tenancy, the Host will aim to conduct a mid-contract term inspection at least once per year, and produce an inspection report, subject to Tenants agreeing to and providing access. In addition to this, the Host will produce reports for the move-in and move-out inspections.

Yes, some form of report comparing the condition of the property between the move-in date, and the move-out date, is needed.

This report can be a narrated video walkthrough recorded by our Host with the tenant ideally present, or a traditional written inspection report by an independent clerk, with photos and text descriptions. We offer these options for your flexibility, tailored to your cost preferences.

If a move-out inspection, and subequent move-in inspection for the next tenancy, are very close together (e.g. within a few days), we can combine the inspections to save on costs and time, so the same reports can be re-used, with the agreement and to the satisfaction of all parties.

Yes, for the Managed Property and Full House service packages, the service agreement you sign with us authorises us to communicate with 3rd parties such as utility supply companies, and local authorities (councils). This is necessary for managing billing accounts on your behalf.

In some cases, the supplier will have their own, additional, authorisation form that we may need to fill in, and sometimes, you may need to sign this. The supplier will not accept the service agreement alone as sufficient authorisation. We will let you know if this is the case. We understand this can be inconvenient for you – to give authorisation multiple times in this way. Unfortunately, this is out of our control and we have no choice but to follow the supplier’s authorisation process.

Please inform us ASAP of any and all utility bills that must be paid for your rental property. This refers to bills such as heating, hot water, electricity, water, and gas. These may vary from property to property.

If you are not sure about which bills relate to your property, we can try to find this out from the property developer or building staff.

Once we have the relevant billing information, our Tenancies Team will instruct the utility companies to charge either you or the tenant as agreed in the terms of the rental contract, as negotiated with the tenant.

Some bills may be sent regularly during the tenancy directly to the tenant for them to pay. Other bills may be sent to you c/o RentLondonFlat, and we may have to pay this cost initially on your behalf, and then recharge that to the tenant, for instance, some utility costs are billed to you as part of the service charge in new-build properties.

In general, these are the utility bills that may relate to a tenancy, please note not all may apply to your property:

– electric
– heating
– hot water
– gas
– cold water
– internet broadband
– council tax

Unless otherwise agreed with the tenant during the neogtiation/offers phase prior to the start of the tenancy, these bills are generally expected to be paid by the tenant.

There may also be some cases where for example the heating for a block of flats is billed in the service charge to you directly as the leaseholder of the flat, and this will have to be recharged to the tenant later, to be settled before they leave the tenancy.

We will review the condition of the property, and the state of utility billing accounts, at the end of the Tenant’s stay, and advise you accordingly of claims that need to be made on the Tenant’s deposit to reimburse you for any associated post-tenancy costs. We hold the Tenants’ deposit in escrow, and will be able to make deductions on the amount held in line with the deposit protection scheme regulations.

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We advise our property Owner clients to purchase a service package that includes rent guarantee cover, e.g. our Full House package (see all our packages, listed above). Once purchased, we at RentLondonFlat.com can guarantee that you will be compensated for lost rent, in line with the terms and conditions of the cover. This means that you could avoid having to make a claim on the tenancy deposit, in order to offset rent arrears.

This would be advantageous because there could be post-tenancy costs, e.g. maintenance repairs, cleaning, and unpaid utility bills (e.g. most importantly heating and cooling – see relevant FAQ, below) that need to be addressed at the end of the Tenant’s stay in your property.

The tenancy deposit is often not able to cover both rent arrears and post-tenancy costs such as maintenance and utility bills.

For most UK leasehold properties in new-build residential developments (e.g. blocks of flats), the heating and cooling utility supply, and billing, is outsourced by the freeholder / building management company. There are a handful of these heating and cooling utility ompanies that provide the heating and cooling supply, e.g. Vital Energi, Switch2, Servus, etc. These supply companies have quite unique and restrictive terms that you, as the property Owner, need to be aware of.

For properties that are rented out in these residential developments (i.e. ones that are not owner-occupied), when registering the Tenant as the bill payer, these heating and cooling utility companies demand that you, as the Owner, must guarantee to cover the arrears if the Tenant becomes delinquent with their bill payments.

This means that even though the Tenant has used the heating and cooling supply during their stay, and they are liable to pay for it as per the tenancy agreement, the contract between you and the heating / cooling supplier obligates you to pay the supplier in any case.

To be sure, these kind of contract terms only apply to heating and cooling bills, and not to other utility bills, or to council tax bills.

Rest assured, this is an extremely rare occurence, since we vet Tenants and seek to provide you with the best possible investment return for your rental property.

Should such rare circumstances arise for in your rental property however, to support you as the Owner and to minimise any losses, we have a special high-priority bill management process for these heating and cooling bills. We monitor the heating bill payments and as soon as the supplier informs us of any Tenant arrears, we act to find out why this has happened, and whether the Tenant is able to clear the arrears. If they are not able to clear the arrears, we activate our arrears management and debt collection protocols and seek to take legal action both in respect of the money owed, and also, if needed, to recover possession of the property as well.

Even though you may need to pay the utility supplier to prevent fines and other penalty costs accruing as a result of the delinquent Tenant’s arrears, there are civil legal actions available for you to recover that money from the Tenant’s assets through debt collection processes.

In the rare case that a Tenant falls into arrears, and where these arrears cannot be recovered from the tenancy deposit, nor from rent guarantee cover, and where the debt is over £300, we would propose to pursue a debt collection process. This requires our instructing a professional enforcement agency to trace the Tenant’s assets and collect the debt. We will seek your approval before proceeding.

There is a one-off cost for all such debt collection cases — £240.00 to prepare the case for submission to the collection agency.

In addition, there will be a 15% commission charged on the debt recovered, that the collection agency imposes, for recovered debts over £500.00. That is paid directly to the collection agent, and RLF does not receive any part of that commission.

From the debt recovered, we will charge our contractually-agreed agency fee — the same as we charge for normally-paid rent paid by the Tenant.

We will then remit the remainder of the recovered debt to you.

Yes, we just need email authorisation from you, stating that we can pay these invoices for you. Once we have that on record, then we can make these payments to the building management, freeholder, or freeholder’s agent on your behalf from the rental monies we hold, before remitting the rent to you. Many of our Owners choose this option because it is convenient for them.

Please click this Link for an example of our Service Agreement Terms and Conditions.