@Robert54
You are of course exactly right. However, as you can see, many landlords simply ignore the law (when it suits them).
I spent some time trying to engage and understand there point of view. There are some nice guys who gave me useful insights and some out-and-out trolls. But the story as far as I can see is…
Landlords have been sold scare stories by an insurance industry that has been becoming ever more powerful, and sees itself as above the law. Most landlords are scared, and making money from them has been easy.
Insurance companies know that most landlords are financially unsophisticated, and have been sowing misinformation. By getting landlords to do the unlawful bits, they make good profits, while encouraging landlords to take the legal risks. A small minority of landlords can see this, a small number just enjoy having power over people, and really don’t care what the law is. Most however, most think that if they imitate what they see around them, they are safe. It’s like how people are happy to speed as long as they are in a group (they can’t arrest us all).
From my point of view, OpenRent was awesome, because it attracted the sort of smart landlord I could get on with. The sort that knew that estate agents were ripping them off. The sort that were happy with OpenRent’s entire system (those were happy days). You still had the problem with “no-DSS”, but really only “no-DSS”. I was offended by that (and still am) but at least it didn’t effect me. Now the brainless zombies have let the insurance industry virtually run the OpenRent letting system. The OpenRent team turn up from time to time, and try point out that they that landlords don’t have to break the law on the behalf of the insurance companies (in fact OpenRent run a very good vetting system, that I would highly recommend as being efficient and fair).
Now OpenRent is pretty much as useless to me.
It’s all because of the costs of eviction. This on average is around 10/20 pounds a year. The zombie-landlords will never “risk” of acting legally, because they wrongly assume the insurance companies will be jointly liable, when the chickens come home to roost, and they start getting sued.
The saddest thing is, this has happened before. Remember when they made it illegal for Estate Agents to charge fees? That was because the insurance companies were getting Estate Agents to ask for bribes. The tenants paid the bribes to the Estate Agents, and the Estate Agents gave the insurance companies their cut. Insurance companies directly profiteering from the corruption of what an “Agent” is. Rather than tackle the insurance companies for corruption, the government invented a fiction of a new law. It has always been illegal for agents to approach a third party for another source of income. It’s like your lawyer asking the buyer of your house to pay a 150 pound parking fee. It was a bribe, pure and simple. Kind of amazing how many landlords objected to making bribing their agents explicitly illegal.
Now the insurance companies can’t profiteer from Estate Agents, they are getting their unlawful kicks directly from scared misinformed landlords…
IMHO, obviously.
