The cost of turfing out tenants

It is often assumed that landlords don’t want to give people long leases preferring to see people leave and obtain a rent increase where possible. This belief doesn’t factor in several concerns, firstly is that rents are not always rising, that moving is an inconvenience to both tenant and landlord and that there are some hard costs to factor in.

For this reason we created a small basic calculation to show that in many cases the recouping costs equate to more than a months rent and that a landlord would have to increase rents by about 12% to break even.

The other thing that happens is the landlord takes on a new risk of an unknown tenant, good tenants are like good credit applicants, they often don’t pay top rates because of their past performance, a new person might be habitually late, break more, or be more high maintenance.

This is yet another reason that shows the benefit of a long lease to a landlord, equally the tenant also benefits by having the protections of a …

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Contracts, not silly rules, are the better form of rent regulation

Something often forgotten are the lessons from history, in recent debates about spiralling rents and other such issues, the one thing that almost never gets mentioned is the power of contracts.

Instead we talk about ‘rent freezes’, ‘rent certainty’ and many other such buzzwords but we overlook the obvious, which in this case is something that goes all the way back to the Land Act of 1881 which Irish people struggled so hard to obtain.

It is the idea of ‘dual ownership’, and it celebrates a 135th year birthday this year.

Dual ownership is the idea that two people can ‘own’ something, albeit in different ways, the idea was also key to Gladstone’s appeasement of the Irish Land League at the time, it was also good idea which has stood the test of time.

Land courts determined fair rents and ‘fixity of tenure’ (one of the ‘three F’s’) was guaranteed by the power of the contract which, as long as the rent was being paid, meant that you couldn’t be evicted.

That power has endured, even today we know of …

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