Landlords have welcomed calls for greater and improved regulation of letting agents, saying that they – as much as tenants – are victims of bad practice.
The Residential Landlords Association said that around two thirds of landlords use letting agents in some way either to advertise a property to rent or to manage their properties – making them just as vulnerable to cowboy practices as tenants.
In a statement, the RLA said: “For too long the sector has remained unprofessional, unregulated and not transparent enough.
“Landlords should be able to have confidence that their agent is qualified to provide the best possible advice within a system that avoids agents being able to cease trading at a minute’s notice and run off with landlords’ and tenants’ money.”
Richard Jones, policy director of the RLA, said: “Almost 90% of landlords in the country are either individuals or couples, many of which rely on letting agents to manage their properties properly. For too long these agents have been trusted with landlord and tenant money without any robust regulatory system to protect it.
“The RLA agrees with the committee’s conclusions in this respect as the best route to tackle cowboy practices which have for too long been allowed to continue unhindered.”
The committee’s report, to which the RLA provided both written and oral evidence, also confirms the RLA’s growing concerns about a lack of robust data on rents in the sector.
Jones said: “Good policy requires good data. For too long the data on private sector rents has been based on organisations playing a game of pick and mix with the figures that best suit whatever argument they want to make.
“For the sake of the public and policy makers who must be bewildered by the large amount of contradicting information, it’s time to take the spin out of rent data and establish a single, robust and credible rent data survey in which the entire industry can have confidence.”
The latest survey, intended to be official, is about rent costs from the Office for National Statistics – but does not even mention rent prices.
The RLA welcomed the rejection by the select committee of rent controls.
The National Landlords Association also welcomed today's CLG report, saying it took the debate about the growth of the private rented sector out of the 1970s and into the 21st century. Chief executive Richard Lambert said the report provided an opportunity for the industry to take.
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Comments
This is quite funny - so who regulates the private landords self-managing and who in the majority of cases whilst well meaning don't really know what they are doing.