Can letting agents charge referencing fees?
This means that you can no longer ask tenants to cover the costs of their own referencing. Your landlord or broker may charge you a fee if they agree to terminate your tenancy early or leave without notice. This can only cover losses incurred by your landlord or your broker’s reasonable costs. Previously, landlords were legally allowed to charge for administrative, tenant reference checks, and other costs.
The policy change will prohibit landlords and landlords from charging tenants for services such as credit checks and inventory, many of which are often seen as exploitative. More than five million tenants in England will receive new rights from Saturday, as the ban on tenant fees finally kicks in. Typical rental fees for tenants should be between £200 and £300 per lease. However, some groups argue that this number has been greatly increased by some rogue agencies. A change may include changing the names in a contract if a roommate moves out and the other tenants find someone else to move in, or asking to keep a pet, or applying for permission to sublet or run a business from the property.
Letting agents can no longer charge tenants fees that are obtained from third parties, such as for reference checks, credit checks, insurance policies, gardening, or warranty applications. This consultation received responses from tenants (50%), landlords (32%), landlords (10%), and other stakeholders (8%). One suggested outcome of the ban is that letting agents are starting to use inventory services “in-house.” Some argue that the ban will result in lawsuits being passed on from landlords to landlords.
While this change is great news for tenants, landlords, and landlords, this change requires careful planning. They believe that a blanket ban “would put additional pressure on landlords, with fewer tenant controls and lower quality of service,” and that “spreading the cost of these services will allow landlords to maintain current levels of service to tenants.” For this reason, we have summarized all information about the new fee ban for rental agents and its significance for landlords, landlords, real estate professionals and tenants. There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the possibility of abolishing management fees for rental agents.
Most likely the more expensive of the 3 options, but if you use a rental agent to market your rental property, they will most likely include a tenant reference service as part of their setup fees. In response to the government ban, ARLA recommends banning upfront fees, but letting agents should be able to spread these costs across the entire lease. Efforts to abolish rental agent fees were driven by the government’s goal of making rentals more stable for tenants.
