Shelter is keeping up the pressure on the Government – whichever it may be – to ban letting agent fees.
Yesterday it tweeted a message, below, asking: “Hit reply to tell us what you’ve spent on letting agent fees and we’ll present it to the government. Let’s make sure the ban goes through.”
Meanwhile, campaigners held an anti-fees protest outside an agent’s office in Bristol at the weekend.
Protesting outside Ocean, in North Street, Acorn said letting agent fees charged to tenants were ‘extortionate’.
Jane McDowell, Bristol co-ordinator for Acorn, said that the average fees charged by six agents on North Street for a two-bed property costing £950 a month to rent came to £1,140.
She said: “How is this affordable for ordinary people?”
The Bristol Post report is in the link below.
The consultation on the forthcoming ban asks questions of detail rather than principle, and closes shortly after the election next month.
http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/revealed-how-much-estate-agents-47332
Spoke to a Scottish 2 office boss. He said they had feared the ban in Scotland (300 rentals) when it hit there.
Time forward and he said they reference tenants at £15 a time and landlords pay.
He said they just got on with it and its been fine.
Knowing this is the norm in Scotland now, the gov will see Scotland as a benchmark and continue.
The English and Welsh protests wont stop the innevitable. Sadly too little too late and our cousins over the Northern border showing life goes on.
The worst will be tenants to be putting in multiple applications as it will cost them zero
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I thought that having multiple searches on your credit history left ‘footprints’ and actually decreased your score?
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The problem with referencing costing “nothing” will mean that lots of paperwork and lots of abortive searches.
Perhaps we will need to remind prospective tenants that repeated searches could possibly influence their credit rating both now and in the future.
They will have to sign a consent form and agree to a credit search being undertaken in any case, even if they are not paying the cost. A warning at that stage may well make flaky enquirers think twice.
Time to call the three major credit referencing agencies and ask the question (Experian, Equifax and Call Credit) do repeated credit searches reduce your credit score?
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there are referencing companies out there, who will provide a service for free, obviously with the ability to up sell to the tenant associated products
on the issue of multiple applications, IMHO the Government will accept that a holding fee will be exempt from the ban…
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Shelter’s chief executive Campbell Robb was paid £120,000 in 2012 while the number of staff there paid over £60,000 increased from five to eight.
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