Is the rent collection service in advance or arrears? Is the final rent at the end of the contract a month before the tenant moves out? The tenancy seems to read like it’s in advance but open rent have taken a month of rent from the tenants.
I advised open rent that they were moving out and in previous tenancies that meant that the rent collection ended. Wondering now that they charge ten pounds for the service if they’ve farmed out the service and the two services don’t talk to each other? In previous tenancies, rent collection ended according to contract. Which they know is ending in few days. Anyone shed any light?
It’s nothing to do with when a tenant moves out. It depends when notice is given.
If you tell OR when notice was given, they should be able to tell you when the last monthly payment was due. Maybe they used the date you provided as the notice date.
I “think” this is how it works . Normally the contract has to end on the usual monthly payment day and if rolling and monthly payments then the last payment will be 1 month before the tenancy ends. So if payment is usually on the 1st of the month and they gave notice on 2nd October the rent for october will already have been taken and one more month will be due and will be taken on 1st november with the contract ending on 30th nov
If they have taken an extra month’s rent because notice was given a month earlier but you didn’t tell OR at the time, I’m sure OR can refund to the tenants. Maybe @mod_harry can help.
Hi thanks for your reply. They gave me notice. So few months ago I went into open rent portal and added the end date of their tenancy. There was no section for ‘when tenants give you notice’ and I didn’t need to serve notice as they had already served me notice. Yet the only option on there was ‘serve tenants notice’.
Should the tenants have served notice to me via the open rent portal rather my end up then? Does the system not recognise it? I would have thought the fact I went into the portal and added their tenancy ending would have signalled that the rent would no longer need collecting…
@Molly9 I’m sorry I don’t know how it’s ‘supposed to work’ but depending when you served notice further months rent may well have been due (as OR won’t have known about tenants serving notice) as I’ve explained. But hopefully @mod_harry can help sort it out for you
There’s guidance here
(Google )“ How do I end my tenancy on OpenRent? – Help”
And in the link page (google) “How can I serve notice to tenants? Openrent” the notice period depends on the type of notice you served. Eg If you used s21 then you have to give 2 months notice so potentially another 2 months rent due..
Think you can also ‘disable rent collection ‘ at any time and get tenant to pay you directly (or not) at any time. Perhaps you could have done that too if you weren’t sure how many payments were left- but 2020 hindsight is amazing…
Thanks hopefully the mod can advise . They gave notice via email on September 28th so I marked that in open rent portal as tenancy ending. Were they susposed to also do something in their online portal?
Last time this happened with previous tenants it all ended well and no rent was taken past the end date. I didn’t need to disable rent collection at all. But this time it’s ongoing.
hopefully someone can help me understand @mod_harry
The date they give notice isn’t when the tenancy ends!
What was the normal rent payment date each month?
The clause in the sample OR Ast is 12.3 (check your actual AST) and says
“The Tenant must give notice of no less than a month… such notice to expire the day before a rent payment day or on final day of initial term”
So if I’ve understood right-Suppose payment date as given in contract was 1st of the month. Then if they gave notice on 28th sep, one more payment on 1st October would be due and the tenancy ends on 31 October.
If more than one further rent collection has happened since 28 sep then I agree something “seems” to have gone wrong.
But if you told OR that you gave notice and did that on 28sep on s21 grounds then because you would then have to give at 2 months notice when using s21, two more payments would be due
I suspect that although as you say these systems really ought to be joined up, disabling the monthly rent collection in ‘rent now’ once the final payment due has been received is also a good idea (and at tenant’s end cancelling the standing order if they have one set up). Just assuming an OR service is clever and ends things when it should automatically is like thinking they have actually people managing your tenancy not an automated process. But they don’t they aren’t a letting agency managing things for you.
Hi thanks. Yes I’ve used open rent for 6 years and never had a problem before. How do I get open rent to call me? Is there a number?
The tenancy was marked by me as ending November 30th when I received notice via tenants emailing me on September 28th. They’d given me the required two months notice. Moving out Nov 30th.
Were they susposed to serve notice in the open rent portal?
Usually the rent stops being taken once the tenancy is ending. Is there a number I can call? @mod_harry
‘Surely’ well if was this simple I wouldn’t be here asking questions. It says the tenancy is ending tomorrow the 30th of November. Hence us all very confused as to why the £1400 has been collected by Open Rent yesterday…
Tried calling Open Rent but they can only pass my message on they said. Tried emailing and the response was a generic response totally ignoring my question.
I’d suggest cancelling the monthly rent collection manually now anyway to ensure nothing further taken by them. Sorry if ridiculously obvious
OR aren’t set up for dealing with things by phone. Send them a message via the button at bottom on the openrent faqs page but don’t expect them to look at till Monday (they don’t seem to work outside normal office hours) and allow 24h from 9am Monday for a response.
Basically it doesn’t matter how it happened you need OR to stop any further collection, and you need to get the 1400 refunded to the tenant if that was wrongly collected.
OR may not have an easy process to refund to tenant (they don’t set up direct debits so won’t necessarily have tenant’s bank or card details) you need to sort out with them whether they will do it (if they have wrongly and illegally probably collected on your behalf money that wasn’t due) or if you will do it.
Hence us all very confused as to why the £1400 has been collected by Open Rent yesterday.
OpenRent does not (and cannot) take rental funds from a tenant’s bank account. The tenants likely have a standing order which they set up with their bank - this will need to be cancelled with the bank.
If payments have been made to a closed Rent Collection account, they will automatically be returned to the payee.