Some good news on reposessions

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the victims of the housing market downturn; tenants in buy-to-let properties. Many have found themselves homeless because their landlord has not kept up with mortgage repayments and had their property repossessed. If the cause were the tenant not paying their rent well fair enough perhaps, but all too often it’s no fault of the tenant at all. Most mortgage agreements contain clauses that require the landlord to seek the lenders permission to grant a tenancy. Many landlords don’t realise it’s there and others just ignore it. After all what lender is going to kick up a fuss? Very few probably so long as mortgage payments are kept up.

But here’s the rub. If the landlord doesn’t keep up with payments and gets repossessed, (and there are plenty of buy-to-let investors who geared themselves up too high and find themselves in difficulty), the tenancy is deemed null and void and the tenants kicked out by the lender.
Good news on this today. The government has announced that it is consulting on new rights for tenants to avoid the worst of this. Within their press release a dreadful story showing why action on this needed “A lone parent with two children who had been renting a property for 10 months. She came back from a holiday to find the locks had been changed and there was a notice announcing that a possession order had been made.”