Landlordreferencing.co.uk – Forum

I worry about the 2 months rent in advance Paul.  I thought I had heard of a case where a judge said that he felt that the extra month was actually a deposit and the landlord was just trying to get around the law and found against him and awarded the tenant 3 months rent in compensation.

However I cant remember exactly when it was or whether it was just a prescient in my dreams or is there a case that actually happened which can be used in precedence against us in a case.

Help its 4 in the morning  

Chris@TDS said:

Paul,

 

To reiterate what Mary has already mentioned, the onus is on the landlord to provide evidence of the charge they want to make because the deposit money belongs to the tenant. If you want to charge a tenant you need to be able to show that the tenant is liable, and that the cost is reasonable.

Speaking on behalf of TDS our adjudicators are certainly not bias. They are all CIArb accredited and we are a Complaint Handler Member of BIOA. We are quite deliberately transparent in what we do and how we work (hence all the stats, guidance, and information we publish ) as we want to challenge this perception of bias. If you look through the documents on our website http://www.tds.gb.com you'll get a good idea of how it all works and why, and how landlords and agents can prevent and prepare for disputes.

At TDS, the allocation of total disputed deposits is almost 50/50 between tenants and landlords/agents. The quality of the evidence we receive from agents has been improving and the proportion allocated to agents/landlords has been increasing – this is not a coicidence. If your records are accurate and detailed (quality not quantity) and your charge is reasonable, the tenant should see that they can't question your charge and the dispute can be nipped in the bud. Remember, we always ask what has been done to try and resolve the dispute before we allow proceedings to begin. If the tenant does pursue a dispute, if you have accurate records to show a reasonable charge you can be confident the adjudication will go in your favour. You have protection against unreasonable tenants, and good tenants are protected against landlords who try and take advantage. Deposit protection is designed to improve industry standards across the board.

Hi Chris,

Sorry late getting back been stuck on something else for a few days. I understand how it is supposed to work but clearly some landlords are finding that is not what is happening. I wonder whether maybe the fact that they money put down as a deposit is not seen as being in escrow and therefore not belonging to either party during a tenancy.

As you say its the tenants money therefore the Landlord needs to prove his case rather than the tenant proving their case first. In the old days a landlord took the deposit and after calculating the damages deducted it from the tenants deposit and that was that. So now landlords feel that the law has fallen down on the tenants side again whereby the landlord now needs to prove their case first and so a tenant who does not wish to make it easy for a landlord can make false allegations which can cost a landlord a lot of time and money to prove them wrong.

As you say I would be interested to know how many tenants win the case because a landlord cannot be bothered to fight just like most of us do not bother to take them to court.

I know with my case it took me 2 full days to collate the evidence and package it up properly to prove my case, I would not bother doing it again because I stood to make back £400 and that is if I got it all and quite frankly to stop doing what I was doing now would cost me a lot more than that. So It would seem that again good landlords pay the price for the bad ones and bad tenants get away with it again riding on the back of the good ones.