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Landlords can't say "No DSS/UC" anymore so they ask for SIX MONTHS rent in advance!

Helen Back

Helen Back

:-)
Okay. So we both lost our jobs due to COVID and fell behind on our rent. We haven't received an eviction notice yet but we're about to. The landlord has applied to the court for one and the case will be heard end of May. I don't know how long we'll be given but we're looking to leave anyway. The in-laws, who live in London, are getting older and have health problems and so need us closer (we're 70 miles away right now). Because we're out of work we're on Universal Credit.

Mr Back has been in London today to look at some flats and only then was told, after travelling down yesterday, that as we're claiming Uiversal Credit we need to pay 6 months rent in advance or find a guarantor who is earning at least £4k a month (I think that's what he said). We don't know anyone who earns that much.

They may not be able to legally deny tenants who are claiming benefits anymore but they make it impossible for them to rent in other ways. And since the average rent in London is, what, £1,500? That's close to £10k we'd have to find OR miraculously one of us finds work that pays enough to cover the rent themselves.

So in 6 weeks we will get an eviction notice. Does anyone know how much notice they give these days? Is it 2 months? 6? Whatever it is, we have that long to find work. On the bright side, things are opening back up again so we may get lucky...
 
kabbes said:
I’m pretty sure that it is illegal now to ask for more than 4 weeks’ rent as a deposit. Have a check.

EDIT: I checked. It’s five weeks.

blog.openrent.co.uk

Maximum Tenancy Deposit: How to Calculate Five Weeks' Rent

Work out the maximum tenancy deposit you can request from your new tenants as per the Tenant Fees Act 2019.
blog.openrent.co.uk blog.openrent.co.uk
Click to expand...

Thanks, you've prompted me to check the Shelter website and they say:
"There's no legal limit on how many monthly or weekly advance payments you can be charged. Some landlords will ask for 6 months' rent in advance or more."

Bearing in mind this stipulation is only because we're claiming then yes, it is pretty shitty.
 
On the eviction front, it depends on what grounds they are evicting you. If it’s a Section 21 then these are on pause till the end of May and the minimum notice is six months. If you have built up six months of arrears then your landlord can apply for a Section 8 notice and they only have to give four weeks notice. If under six months, then the minimum notice stands at six months currently. Depending on your relationship with the landlord, I would try and negotiate a S21 notice as the landlord doesn’t have to cite a reason and arrears will make it harder for you to get another private rental property when they do their checks. You don’t have to leave until the date given in the notice. After this date, bailiffs can be called in to enforce and you could be liable for the charge. Councils often recommend sitting tight until the bailiffs turn up and whilst this is technically true, the reality is that it’s a stressful and horrible process and the landlord can go to the high court. High court sheriffs do not have to give notice that they are coming and can just arrive without warning. If you can avoid this stress then it’s the ideal situation but it’s not always possible.
 
Helen Back said:
Unlikely at the moment. We don't know many people as it is, even fewer who would be willing to do that. I think there's more chance of one or both of us finding workk, tbh. At least we have the site that purenarcotic posted. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah it's a big ask! Sorry just re-read your post to say you'd mentioned a guarantor. :facepalm:

That NODSS sites good just check it regularly. We have a housing association that do private rents at affordable rents too with low deposit (places for people) so it could be worth checking if you have something similar. Good luck!
 
When evictions can start again, the courts are likely to be completely overwhelmed with applications and bailiffs will be inundated. We don’t quite know what that will mean yet; it could be people get to stay put longer whilst the courts work through the backlog, it could mean that we see a rise in bailiff employment and with that dodgy evictions... councils are already overwhelmed and this is going to apply a tidal wave of pressure but what each council does is yet to be seen. I suspect some may offer to pay arrears off in return for non eviction to lighten the burden. A lot of scummy people are about to get very, very rich.
 
That's rotten Helen Back. When we last moved in late 2016 the landlord wanted an £1800 deposit and six weeks' rent (so another £1650) in advance and that was hard enough for us to find then.
 
purenarcotic said:
On the eviction front, it depends on what grounds they are evicting you. If it’s a Section 21 then these are on pause till the end of May and the minimum notice is six months. If you have built up six months of arrears then your landlord can apply for a Section 8 notice and they only have to give four weeks notice. If under six months, then the minimum notice stands at six months currently. Depending on your relationship with the landlord, I would try and negotiate a S21 notice as the landlord doesn’t have to cite a reason and arrears will make it harder for you to get another private rental property when they do their checks. You don’t have to leave until the date given in the notice. After this date, bailiffs can be called in to enforce and you could be liable for the charge. Councils often recommend sitting tight until the bailiffs turn up and whilst this is technically true, the reality is that it’s a stressful and horrible process and the landlord can go to the high court. High court sheriffs do not have to give notice that they are coming and can just arrive without warning. If you can avoid this stress then it’s the ideal situation but it’s not always possible.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we're trying to avoid all that. We've not been able to pay the full rent for 6 months, although we have been trying to pay some. I think we'll find work in 6 months, surely. It's 7 weeks until the case, then at least 4 weeks' notice after that is 13 weeks/3 months. We should be able to find work by then...

And while I was typing that Mr Back phoned up and said that as we have familial ties with the area we could try going to the in-laws' local council and ask if they could help us with finding somewhere that will accept us. So all things considered, we're entirely our of options just yet. :)
 
Helen Back said:
Yeah, we're trying to avoid all that. We've not been able to pay the full rent for 6 months, although we have been trying to pay some. I think we'll find work in 6 months, surely. It's 7 weeks until the case, then at least 4 weeks' notice after that is 13 weeks/3 months. We should be able to find work by then...

And while I was typing that Mr Back phoned up and said that as we have familial ties with the area we could try going to the in-laws' local council and ask if they could help us with finding somewhere that will accept us. So all things considered, we're entirely our of options just yet. :)
Click to expand...

By all means go on the list, but in some boroughs in London the minimum wait for a council house is several years, so don’t expect this as a quick alternative. You may be able to access temporary accommodation through them though; this is usually a hotel room, occasionally a temporary flat. Temporary accommodation is not necessarily in the council area, it is wherever they have space which could be out of borough or even out of city. I’m not trying to be depressing or obstructive but I do think it’s important to be realistic.
 
Ugh, massive bugbear of mine. And sadly - I briefly thought I might be able to squeeze the funds together for a studio flat rather than flatshare when I moved last autumn and looked online for possible flats, that's when I noticed it - it seems to become more and more common to just ask for a guarantor as default, even from people in full employment who meet the income threshold.
I think it's changed sometime in the last 5-10 years, didn't used to be a thing for the first decade of me renting in London.

When I just googled for a bit more info on this I found this "charming" landlord blog (sharpen your pitchforks, people, you will need them).
www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk

HELP, I Can't Get A Tenant Guarantor - Here's What You Should Do!

Sadly, many tenants struggle to get rental guarantors, while most landlords and agent won't accept tenants without one. Here are a few solutions that WORK!
www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk

I clicked on the comments which are quite interesting in as far as there are only a couple from the time the blog was written (2015), but then more and more people saying in the last couple of years "wtf is going on, I have been renting for x years/decades and now can't find a place without a guarantor", so it does seem a recent development on top of all the other insults and injuries of the UK rental market.

Not only, of course, do people generally have a limited pool of people who they could ask for such a massive favour, they also often have to be UK homeowning and not retired to qualify. And disclose a massive amount of personal and financial information. And as I understand it is also very difficult to get out of it again (you can't just do it for a fixed time, I don't think), so it is a massive commitment for the guarantor.

It might be worth looking into one of those rent guarantee insurance schemes that FridgeMagnet mentioned - of course, the parasitic scum factor is rather off-putting and they sound pretty scammy, but I think they are a thing.
Council offering a similar service sounds a much better option, so fingers crossed for you.🤞

Having said all that, the landlord of the flat I ended up moving into didn't ask me for any references nor a deposit! (One of the flatmates had been here for a few years already, but she hasn't paid a deposit either and we have signed a normal formal joint tenancy agreement together between three of us).
That almost put me off as well for being so unusual. 😂

Have you tried OpenRent | Property To Rent From Private Landlords ? All private landlords, I think, and not going through agencies, which I find preferable in terms of being able to speak to the landlord directly and potentially develop some sort of rapport.

Wishing you the best of luck!
 
FridgeMagnet said:
Yeah, "advance rent" is the new "absurd deposit" - not just for DSS either. In fact there are now companies who will now act as guarantors for advance rent, taking their cut of course. Just in case there weren't quite enough levels of parasite in the housing market.
Click to expand...
Shit, that I did not know. New lows all the time.

It's become really common for landlords to demand six months in advance. Sometimes they even then want another six months in advance to cover the next six months. Its absurd and makes it clear landlords will take the piss with every thing that isn't regulated. So we could regulate every single thing or maybe we should just buy them all out at below market value for social housing. If that sounds absurd, a lot of the council estates you see today were built on land compulsorily purchased below market value. That's how they did things back then and we could do it again.
 
Yeah I didn't need a guarantor as a teenager, then once they started coming in it was a sort of not very formal thing where you just had to get a name address and signature of another person eg next of kin, now it's full blown they want to run a credit check on your guarantor who owns a house and earns 3x your rent. last time around the letting agents did a more thorough check on me than I'd need for a mortgage. Burn the system to the fucking ground
 
someone else on here (I'll let them identify themselves if they want) had trouble recently, having sold a house (and therefore had a fairly decent sum in the bank) but wanting to rent somewhere so they could start a new job somewhere else, and they had difficulties with finding a letting agent who would rent to them.

this does seem to be a new thing - i've moved and rented before (although the last time was getting on for 20 years ago)
 
It sounds like this doesn’t necessarily solve the advance rent / guarantor problem, and I don’t know how he did it, but a friend managed to get a tenancy with a private landlord whilst on benefits without the landlord knowing he was on benefits. It was a couple of years ago so probably housing benefit not UC and I wish I had grilled him more exhaustively on his methods but it’s too late now. But knowing it can be done might be a useful avenue.
 
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