New housing minister Gavin Barwell has said he will not ban letting agent fees – for the time being.
Barwell’s stance emerged in the course of a meeting with ARLA’s managing director David Cox about improving the private rented sector.
At the meeting Cox raised a number of topics with the minister, including the recently passed Housing and Planning Act 2016.
The Act introduces a power for the First-tier Tribunal to serve a banning order on a landlord or letting agent who has been convicted of a Banning Order Offence.
The Government is due to consult very soon on what will constitute a Banning Order Offence.
Cox outlined to the minister the importance of ensuring that agents banned from lettings activity should also be banned and unable to carry out estate agency work and vice versa.
The minister responded to Cox’s lobbying for mandatory Client Money Protection for letting agents by saying that he would wait for the outcome of the CMP Review that is currently being undertaken by Lord Palmer and Baroness Hayter.
Cox said he hoped that responses to the review and the increasing number of news reports about cases such as Kelly Hodd who defrauded her former employer JMA Associates in St Leonards on Sea of £4,720 over a four-month period in 2015, will convince the Government that mandatory CMP is necessary.
On the issue of letting agent fees, the minister said that he was not inclined to ban them at this stage.
He did, however, say that he was working on a strategy to stimulate the supply of houses and help tackle the growing demand for homes that people can afford to buy.
Cox also brought to Barwell’s attention the need for greater enforcement of current regulations in the private rented sector – including both recently created and long-standing laws.
A potential new development was an acknowledgement by Barwell and his team about the need for the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) to be replaced with a ‘Fit for Human Habitation’ criteria.
ARLA has long campaigned for this because it claims the HHSRS is complicated and poorly understood by tenants, landlords, agents and enforcement officers.
“On the issue of letting agent fees, the minister said that he was not inclined to ban them at this stage.”
as slippery as a jelly with the same amount of back bone or conviction. We all know Ministers will flop around and panda to the shouty shouty lobby groups whilst keeping an eye on their own income/pensions whilst imposing more taxes or restrictions on the above board and hard working members of society who pay for these Ministers and MP’s
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The subject of letting agent’s fees side stepped with a ‘no ban…for now’. Perhaps an opportunity for ARLA to get together with other regulatory bodies in our industry and cap agents fees for their own members
….Although that’s not going to happen is it as the some of their members are the worst culprits for over charging and the very reason why we are where we are. Come on David Cox…have some balls…no pun intended!
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The idea of having to publish fees was intended to help tenants identify which agents to stay away from and likewise the landlords to consider the same in fear tenants will stay away but the message clearly didn’t get through to the public in terms of relevance. Maybe its about time the whole thing on fees (and lack of disclosure by many) should be reviewed and made more relevant. Remember the FS wealth warning etc? The only ones who would be upset are the ones the fees was supposed to expose …… “WARNING this agency may charge higher fees than others and be too costly for tenants to afford and the property not be let, please consider their fee structure before engaging with this and other agents”.
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Michael Green, founder of CaseHUB erstwhile champion of tenants agaisnt agent’s fees is of course doing the job for free, out of the goodness of his own heart, except he isn’t. If successful in court, CaseHub will take a massive 33% of any award.
It is apparetnly okay and indeed neccessary for everyone ot work for free, except of course, Mr Green.
I’m not an agent but a direct letting and managing landlord and guess what, we charge fees as well. It’s quite simple really, rent is what pays for the occupation of a property and discrete fees are what pays for the process of admission. The current groundswell of anti fees sentiment is strange as in personal finances the FSA, now the FCA, were adamant that bundled charging and cross subsidies through commmission was wrong and unfair. So, why is it that a tenant who is a difficult applicant, requires a tailored contract, want’s a change of co-tenant etc etc etc etc shouldn’t pay for the priviledge of being a more expensive management proposition than a bog standard applicant or, more accurately, why should a straight forward tenant pay more through higher rents than they would otherwise?
So that’s why we take the full disclosure route, so much to process the application, so much to register the deposit (we DO actually pay for the privildge of protecting a tenan’t deposit), so much for the Right to Rent checks, so much for the inventory and our inventories have a round 250 full colour pictures for a one bed apartment.
My time isn’t free, just like everyone else’s and don’t l;et’s forget that the LibDem Peer gets paid just to turn up.
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