Dear Member,

Once again we like to take the Friday newsletter as an opportunity to thank all our members for their support and welcome on board our newbies. Let’s all keep uploading tenant information to share with each other and keep the alerts coming as we always get lots of matches on these.  It is great to see that we CAN save our members from taking on each others problem tenants – we stopped 24 members taking on notoriously problem tenants this week alone! Get your friends and Letting agents to sign up so we can save more people and increase the chances of saving YOU.

There has been a great response from our campaign for members to use the services that are advertised on our site. One of our advertisers in zone E58 (see advert on this URL: http://en58.landlordreferencing.co.uk/) has taken £11,500 worth of business in 1 month. This is due to YOU using their services which in turn keeps our advertisers wanting to advertise, thus LRS stays FREE!! Thank you so much for your support with that especially.

On a slightly different note we want to refer you to the article we sent to you on Monday regarding rent arrears in 2010 being £56 million more than in 2009. We mentioned that these are likely to rise by over 12% this year, especially in light of the announcement that GDP was 0.5% down, showing a true possibility of either a double dip recession or at best a wages freeze combined with higher inflation, inevitably bringing higher prices. So, the long and short of it is less money all round This will of course mean a greater chance of tenants, especially LHA tenants using their housing payments i.e. your rent, to support their lifestyle.

Anyway the point of bringing this to your attention again is that one of our members has contacted us to say that the Residential Property Investor magazine issued by the RLA has published the following article:

Void periods fell by 15% last year, meaning that two-thirds of Landlords had their properties vacant for only two weeks, at a loss in rent of just £319.

According to LSL Property Services, which owns the estate agency chains Your Move and Reeds Rains, only 18% of landlords had properties vacant four or more weeks last year and 7% had properties vacant for over ten weeks – but this figure included landlords refurbishing their properties.  Nine in ten landlords (88%) expect void periods to be less than four weeks this year, the firm said.

The reason we mention these two reports together is because some members seem to have got the two articles confused as they almost seem to be contradictory with one stating there is 15% less voids and one stipulating 12% higher voids on rents.

We wanted to clarify that the RLA is talking about rent voids on property space available for tenure and our original article on Monday refers to the tenants who are in tenure and 12% more of them who don’t pay their rent. There are two different figures here to note and they do not correspond with one another. In summary, there are more tenants, less flats available and a lot more of them that are in tenure are not paying their rent.

Again, we ask you to send this email on, Twitter it, put it on Facebook and tell people to join LRS to keep us all safe in the future. The more people that use LRS the better the system works. Let us revolutionise the Letting industry by closing ranks showing we are not prepared to accept legislation that allows people to steal our rent and trash our properties without recourse – LRS is the recourse, so let’s make it work. 

Thank you for you wonderful suggestions for the OurLoop site. We have had brilliant feedback on that, you will see that we have tried to incorporate your ideas so the page has changed around already and I am sure there will be more changes to come before the launch date on the 4th of February. Anybody that still does not know what OurLoop is you can read about it on this URL: http://www.national.landlordreferencing.co.uk/contents/en-uk/otherurl.html?ourl=D31 and you can preview the static page by going to www.ourloop.co.uk

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend.

  Kindest Regards

Sarah Shakespeare