Tenant Manual And Document

Any landlord that has set up a new tenancy recently, prepares themselves for a barrage of questions from their new tenant following the handover of the property.

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Sometimes landlords are pleasantly surprised and the tenancy proceeds without further contact with the tenant; the rent goes into your account and we are all happy.

Inevitably there are tenancies where you seem to be barraged with lots of petty questions from the tenant about what appears to be pretty obvious stuff.

“What day are the bins collected?”
“Who do I need to contact in the case of emergencies?”
“The lights go off, where is the fuse box or RCD?”

It’s times like this that many professional landlords and even small amateur landlords think, if only I had given my tenants a handbook or manual. They then could have maybe sorted all this out themselves.

Well, this was exactly the thoughts of one Property Hawk user Kevin Wade. Kevin a professional landlord with a portfolio approaching 50 properties down in Essex was so fed up with a stream of enquiries from his tenants that he has spent over a year putting together his own tenant manual. Kevin like many of us got into being a landlord by first becoming an accidental landlord back in the property down turn of the mid -1980s.

His manual sets out in detail the tenants responsibilities and how they should act in relation to rent and when and what fees are charged by the landlord. It warns them over security and fire safety and gives advice on how to contact the landlord and other relevant organisations. Importantly it also sets out what happens at the end of the tenancy and leaves them in no uncertain terms of how the landlord will act if rent goes unpaid.

Kevin has developed this tenant manual for his own purposes but ultimately he would like to adapt it for general use by all landlords.

“I produced the manual after seeing one produced by a housing association. As I got more tenants I got asked more and more the same questions, or found my self writing to the tenant about the same things.”

“I produced it to have a reference to tenants of how I expect them to perform as our tenants.”

“The general feed back from tenants is that it sets down in a plain common sense way what is expected of them and my procedures in dealing with matters. It has (apart from the jokes) been received well.”

The Property Hawk team thinks this is a great idea and we have set up a Google account to allow landlords to view the tenant manual and work with Kevin to produce a really useful generally useable tenant’s manual.

To view the tenant manual.

If landlords do have any more useful documents, we would love to know more