We have two reliable and trustworthy tenants, one of whom is moving out. The remaining original tenant has a friend to move in, but this friend is currently unemployed and so has failed the referencing. From the outset, the new prospective tenant has offered to pay either 6 months (of their share) in advance with a guarantor, or 12 months (of their share) in advance without a guarantor. The OpenRent site suggests there should be an option for this (Can my tenant pay multiple months’ rent in advance? – Help Centre) but when I go to the Tenancy Renewal page, the Rent In Advance option simply isn’t there. Any ideas please? Thanks.
Hi @Andrew115,
The rent in advance options outlined in that article are for new tenancies rather than renewals - I’ve added a note at the top to make this clearer.
The best way to proceed here would be to request the upfront rent directly from the new tenant.
I can see you’re using our Rent Collection service as well, we’d recommend using the “Add Rent Payment” button to manually log the advance payment for the next six months so only the remaining rental amount will be requested from the tenant still paying monthly.
I appreciate this isn’t as smooth as it could be, we’ll look to see where we can make some improvements here.
Thank you @mod_harry. Can you confirm whether the ‘request for upfront rent directly from the new tenant’ would be paid direct to our bank account or through OpenRent?
Also, how do we document this? Would it be in the lease?
You can do it either way.
The caveat here is the Rent Collection service - let’s assume the whole rent is £1,000pcm and the tenants split this equally. If the new tenant pays £3,000 to OpenRent for their share over the six months, our Rent Collection system will view this as the whole rent being paid for three months so we wouldn’t remind either tenant for their rent payments in this period.
The best way around this would be to accept the funds directly and log this on the Rent Collection system manually for each month. For example, you would manually add six payments of £500 for the next six months. That way each month we’d only request the remaining rent to be paid.
You can also reflect this in a custom clause in the contract.
As mentioned, we know this isn’t as smooth as it could be. The main reason being that our Rent Collection service looks at tenancies as a whole rather than on an individual level.
Do let me know if I can clarify this further.
Andrew, assuming this is a joint tenancy, it is likely that this will need to be a new tenancy anyway as one person in a joint tenancy can’t just move out without creating a legal mess. I would suggest a deed of surrender to end the tenancy for both and a brand new tenancy for the remainer and new person.
Incidently, I think most experienced landlords would think twice about taking on the new tenant youve described.
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If the guarantor stacks up I dont see a problem, but if the guarantor doesnt have ownership of a property themselves what leverage do you have if the 5hit hits the fan !!
Thanks. The tenant has paid 12 months in advance. I’ve started to manually add the advance payments for each month. Can I do each of the 12 logs in one go, or does it have to be done on a monthly basis? I’ve uploaded two payments - one in September (for Oct), one in October (for Nov), but it looks as though both payments have been assigned to the October balance. Can you confirm if payments need to be added monthly or whether they can be bulk uploaded now for the next 12 months with each payment credited against the corresponding calendar month?
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