Updating post from Reddit.
I paid 1500 in two months rent when I needed to leave my contract (bare in mind it was a renewal and the contract hadn't started yet)
Empty occupancy is expensive.
Council tax, mortgage, amenities.
If managed through an agency there can be fees involved in renewing contracts (paid by the landlord, can be several hundred pounds worth). LL might have paid the fee for your renewal and will now have to do it again for another tenant.
You 'cant' break the contract, you are liable for Rent and Council Tax, etc until your contract ends OR the landlord replaces you.
What that means in effect is you wont have the money? So the bill will rack up, they will get a CCJ against you, if your working get an attatchment of earnings against you. They may try and get a baliff arround later to take some of your stuff, they may make you bankrupt, they may freeze your bank account and take the funds.
Lots of not good stuff.
So the best way, is to be open and clear with your landlord/agent. You want to get your stuff out ASAP, make sure its clean and good-to-rent, get the keys to the agent/landlord, apologise and try and work with them. Pay as much as you can but the important thing is them getting a new tenant in to replace you. Once a new tenant is in, your liability ends.
Until then, live with friends/family so you can still pay this bill (in part or in full).
The bad news is your doing this at the wrong time. Labour have a new law where all you have to do is give notice and your done. No fixed term tenancies. It's going to be awhile until its law however, and not sure it would apply to older tenancies.
>not sure it would apply to older tenancies.
In the bill's current form, it will apply to all ASTs immediately.
Yes. What is not clear is how it will apply to periodic tenancies, and some severe unfairness might arise there. Someone on a SPT would be entitled to give 1 month of notice. If this suddenly increases to 2 months this would be very unfair and would remove a right those tenants already have. Also for tenants coming to the end of a fixed term, they would have been entitled to give zero notice at the end of the term and it would be unfair if that right was removed.
In my opinion 2 months of notice is way too long anyway for the tenant. a) It is longer than previously, b) makes it nearly impossible to move without duplicate rent, and c) is unnecessary for the landlord as almost all tenancies are filled in a much shorter timescale, and in practice they cannot really take concrete steps anyway until the tenant is out.
I can see that they are creating a dog's dinner all around.
It would be fairly easy to say it is 2 months, or the current length of time required by existing terms, whichever is shorter.
The intention really is just to give tenants the ability to 'break' a longer agreement in such a way that gives the landlord 'enough' time to do something about it and minimise their costs.
Not quite. There is 30 days notice from both sides. My contract anyways.
This is going back about 15+ years, but me and my girlfriend (now wife) were 2 months into an AST agreement when for work reasons we had to move away. Speaking with the estate agent, there was absolutely no way to break the AST, only for it to be mutually annulled. They promised to find a replacement tenant ASAP, at which point we could rip up the AST agreement and cease liability. It took them about 4 weeks to find a replacement tenant, at that point we got out of the tenancy contract.
My point to the OP is that I fully understood then the extra cost that would be incurred for them, based on my decision/need to break the contract. Luckily the estate agent was nice, understanding, and did their best to work it out amicably.
4 weeks is good, I'd budget for at least 2 months of remaining liable.
The 4 weeks it took were just my individual circumstances based on the understanding estate agent, our good communication and trustworthiness, and the basis that at that time there was demand for properties to rent in the area (without these key points I could well envisage having to have seen out the 6 month minimum term!)
The actual impact is the landlord will have to pay:
The real world impacts are basically none, but most landlords are on buy to let mortgages and can't afford it if rent is late.
They were asking about consequences as a tenant. I'm not aware of any landlord paying council tax under these circumstances, would be the former tenant if still within a fix term.
An agency that charges fees for a tenant they put in, but absconded after a few months would be hilarious.
About 46% of BTL properties are mortgage free.
Early means the ratio of empty time to filled time is worse.
Also, less time to prepare for getting the house up to scratch potentially.
The time and effort of finding new tenants is draining.
Void periods are the most costly part of it. Essentially if you expect to have 2 weeks of voids for every year of filled, you will price that in.
Changing that to 2 weeks for every 6 months is obviously worse.
Plus all the cost of running viewings (yes, landlords value their time just like everyone else), referencing, council tax, utilities, time spent changing all of this over, organising deposits, inventory etc..
All a lot of faff.
Getting somebody new in can take time, you don’t want to rush into the first applicant that applies. In the meantime you’ll probably have some minor repairs or decorating to do. You’ve got the energy companies to switch into the LLs name and pay, council tax (which is now doubling for empty properties) agents fees for finding new, mortgage if it has one. So not only is the property sat empty making nothing, it’s also costing the LL. If it’s a £1000 a month property, your essentially really negative that grand, plus another couple of hundred a month on bills etc
Mine moved to monthly and just gave notice. He's leaving in 30 days and plenty demand to find another.
Finding a tenant is expensive. I think last time it took 3-4 months to actually get someone to move in despite lot of applications for the property (tenant 1 lost job so could not afford rent anymore so pulled out after all the checks were done we were ready to sign papers, tenant 2's family circumstances changed drastically after checks so they no longer were able to move, after checks were tenant 3 said out of the blue that they wanted the whole house refurbished before moving in without increase in the rent (which was lower considering it wasn't in brand new condition) while also insisting bringing in free flying birds in the house so we politely decline, the tenants # 4 who moved in the property were moving cross country so there was a vacancy period before they actually would move in). In the meanwhile the mortgage, insurance, council tax, bills etc need to paid.
Additionally, the letting agencies typically charge 90%-100% of the first month's rent for finding the tenants and sorting the paperwork.
For above reasons I am happy for tenants to break lease if they continue paying rent until the new tenant moves in and cover the cost of finding a new tenant.
I know lot of people are against landlords making money put at the end of the day, letting properties is a business, and a business needs to be financially viable for LL to continue letting. I know for a fact that my tenants (despite decent salaries) could not afford to buy the house they were renting and their rent payment barely covered the interest and expenses. I'm fortunate that I can throw in my own money to keep the tenants housed as it is a temporary situation but no business is viable with zero income for 2-4 months while the bills keep running and new bills are added with the limited profit margins LLs are often operating on to begin with.