No work, all play: landlords should always check lettings agents' credentials — as this cautionary sex party tale shows

It's important to check your letting agent's credentials, as one owner — who caught the "laddish" new guy with his pants down — discovered.
Victoria Whitlock6 November 2017

You're not going to believe what happened to a friend of mine who caught his letting agent with his pants down — literally — but I swear that every word of this is true.

My friend, who owns several flats on a south London estate, had used the same local letting agent to find tenants and manage his properties for years without any problems.

The agent, who operated as a one-man band, always found him good-quality tenants, his properties were always let and maintenance issues were dealt with efficiently. In short, my friend had no complaints.

A few months ago the agent informed him that he had sold his business and a new letting agent would take over managing his portfolio. My friend met the new guy, thought he was "a bit of a lad", but he assumed he would get the same good service.

My friend didn't really have any concerns until the agent tried, and failed, to re-let one of his properties, leaving him with a three-week void, with no money coming in.

"It was a bit of shock to have such a long void," my friend told me, "I've had that flat for years and it always re-lets immediately, I couldn't understand why it was still empty after three weeks."

Thinking the place might need sprucing up a bit, he asked his usual decorator to go and take a look and was pretty shocked to get a phone call from him early one morning to say that there was a party going on in the flat.

Apparently, the decorator had interrupted a couple of guys who were entertaining several… ahem… ladies, and from the state of the place, they'd been having quite a lot of fun, not all of which was entirely legal. According to my friend, it was a pretty debauched affair involving substance abuse.

Of course the decorator had no idea who these people were, but he told them to clear off. At the same time, he was quick-witted enough to whip out his phone and take photos of the group as they scurried out. When my friend turned up minutes later and looked at the shots, he immediately recognised one of the men running out in a state of undress as no other than his new letting agent.

He promptly changed the locks and sent the agent an email terminating their contract and attaching the locksmith's bill, together with an invoice from the cleaners he'd hired to clean up the mess. The agent put up no argument.

My friend found a new agent and the flat was let within a matter of days. So the point of this story is "never assume". Never assume that just because you had a good letting agent that the next one will be good too. Make sure your letting agent is a member of a professional body, such as ARLA (the Association of Renting and Letting Agents), NALS (the National Approved Letting Scheme) or UKALA (the UK Association of Letting Agents).

Even then, just because an agent is a member of an association doesn't mean he or she is going to deliver the goods. So check the agent out, look at his client list, maybe call some of them, see what sort of service they are getting and keep an eye on the agent until you feel satisfied that they can do an efficient job and that they are earning your fee.

Victoria Whitlock lets four properties in south London. To contact Victoria with your ideas and views, tweet @ vicwhitlock