Commitment issues: offering to guarantee someone's rent could mean you're locked in for life

The phone rings. It’s a self employed taxi driver who wants to know if I accept tenants — ie him — claiming housing benefit. He tells me he’s “good for the rent” because he earns more than £40,000 a year, but as he only declares less than half his income on his tax return, he’s “entitled” to benefits.

“So you’re a tax dodger and a benefits cheat?” I ask him.

He replies: “You get what you can, everyone does it.” I tell him not to bother coming to view my flat, as I don’t want to get embroiled in someone else’s fraud.

Mind you, so many people are now part of the so-called “gig economy” that most of my tenants tell me their actual earnings are higher than indicated on their tax returns. I don’t know if this means almost everyone is cheating the system, or they’re just bigging themselves up.

Whatever, many of my tenants don’t earn enough on paper to pass a credit check, so I usually ask them for a guarantor. While this isn’t generally a problem for students and young professionals, whose parents are happy to guarantee their rent if only to get them to leave home, it can be awkward for those who don’t have relatives who can help.

I recently had a low-waged nanny whose employer offered to act as her guarantor, until she scrutinised the tenancy agreement and realised she could potentially be locked into the deal for the rest of her life.

The agreement, supplied by the online letting agent I was using, stated the guarantee was “not limited to the term specified” and would apply “during the initial term or any extension, renewal or continuation of the agreement”. She couldn’t even get out of it by dying: a clause said the guarantee would continue after that.

The guarantor wasn’t comfortable signing an agreement that might last long after the nanny had left her. I didn’t blame her. I’d naively assumed all guarantors were automatically released from their obligations at the end of the initial fixed term, but I’ve since discovered that the agreement my agent provided was not at all unusual.

Many deeds of guarantee continue until the tenant leaves or the landlord changes the terms of the contract, such as by increasing the rent. Who’d agree to that?

The nanny’s employer was happy to act as a guarantor for the initial 12- month contract, after which she wanted the option to say yes or no to an extension, so I asked the agent to amend the agreement. Not possible, they said. It was a standard contract and any changes they made might not be legally sound.

Their attitude was, if the guarantor couldn’t trust the tenant to guarantee their rent indefinitely, I shouldn’t trust her either. This was naïve and unhelpful. In the end, I added my own clause releasing the guarantor from her obligations at the end of the initial term. Let’s hope we never have to find out whether it’s legally sound.

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