A landlord in Manchester recently had an unpleasant surprise.  He sought to increase the monthly rent from £1,650 to £1,700.  The tenant appealed to the First Tier Tribunal and it decided the rent should be REDUCED to £1,450.  So instead of gaining £600 per annum, he’s lost £2,400, a swing of a whopping £3,000!

The key to successfully increasing rents seems to be collating evidence of rents actually achieved in similar properties but this isn’t the same as listing the asking prices in adverts.  The Tribunal is only interested in evidence, not adverts.

It also makes you wonder about student groups for example.  If a group asks to stay on and you increase the rent, there is a risk that they challenge it later at the Tribunal even if they happily signed the contract.  While a completely new group could do the same, would the burden of them proving the rent was unreasonably high not be greater as they weren’t party to a previous arrangement?

Perhaps landlords will need to create a database where we log the rents achieved so we can provide comparative data in case of future challenges to the Tribunal.