The Deposit Protection Service says it is now the UK’s largest provider of tenancy deposit protection.
It has over 390,000 landlords plus 35,000 letting agents registered, and says that on average 200 landlords register every day.
While the lettings agent figure seems extraordinarily high – indeed higher than most estimates of the size of the industry – the DPS says that in the last year, over 4,500 letting agents have joined.
It says that in the last 12 months, the largest number of claims were for damage, overtaking cleaning disputes for the first time. The highest value claim is still for rent arrears.
Just 2.5% of deposits protected entered the dispute process, but many were resolved between the landlord, agent and tenant, with only 1.9% referred to adjudicators.
In the last year, over 462,000 deposits have been repaid, with an average repayment time of two days.
Director Kevin Firth acknowledges, however, that “by far the biggest challenge that custodial schemes face is the ability to repay deposits quickly”.
Of the deposits returned, 48% were repaid in full.
In a new review, it also says that the average tenancy now lasts 22 months, and that deposits have risen from an average of £600 in 2007 – when tenancy deposit protection became mandatory – to nearly £900.
The DPS is chiefly known as offering a custodial tenancy deposit scheme but also now offers an insurance-backed version.
hmmm? so if they have 390,000 landlords with say only one property each they are sitting on £292,500,000 at an average of say £750 per deposit (I'm sure its much higher than that). If all of their 3500 claimed letting agents had a very conservative average of say only 25 properties that would put another £656,250,000 in their vaults. A total of £948,750,000 or a little under a billion pounds.
Someone remind me again why the taxpayer is having to support them?
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Insightful statistic from the DPS concerning the average length of tenancies which shoots down campaigning organisations hysteria around short term tenancies!
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