I have issued a Section 21 (prior to May 1st), the expiry date is today and the tenants have not moved out. They say they are looking and also have applied for council support.
OpenRent have informed me that I have 10days to make a claim against the deposit (as it thinks the tenants have moved out as today is the end of tenancy date on OR) or the full deposit will be given back to tenants. They advised me to ‘Unend’ the tenancy on OR but when I went to do that it says the tenants will be informed that the tenancy has been ‘unended’. I don’t want to give them false hope and more importantly I don’t want the Section 21 to become null and void. I am aware that when ending the tenancy on OR it isn’t legally binding so maybe unending is also not legally binding. But this feels messy. Has anyone been in this situation? Or have any advice? I obviously want to keep their deposit protected and OR are telling me the only way to do this is to ‘unend’ the tenancy. Thanks everyone!
@Amal8 get OR to confirm 'unending ’ does not.issue.a new tenancy and (as previously) current tenancy continues.
Apply for possession before 31 July (or the s21 does expire). Tenants need this otherwise they’ll never get council to pay attention and find them somewhere
Thanks for the reply. Planning on applying for possession asap.
This is what OR have said:
Please note that this action is purely administrative, it will send an email to the tenants that the end date has changed.
It’s not possible to formally rescind a Section 21 notice, so this will remain in place. However, we’d recommend that you contact the tenant to clarify the situation by writing a letter or a message.
So, I assume in addition to issuing the Section 21 via OR, you also ‘ended’ the tenancy as a separate process, rather than these two being linked. I don’t ‘end’ a tenancy on OR, until they have left & it has ended, just in case they don’t leave.
@Amal8 agree with @David122 especially as s21 is no more so if you get it wrong you can’t even do s21 again and would need to start from scratch on some other grounds. Meanwhile your tenants may just stop paying and you may have little chance ever getting the arrears back (if they are asking council for help then they won’t have much savings)
It’s worth investigating what can go wrong, costs re lost rent etc if you have to start again and costs of using a specialist - they should be able to tell you the costs at each stage up to and including bailliffs - and thinking if you have the expertise.
Check if your LL insurance cover includes legal expenses or any legal advice
You can also.check if your s21 was valid using the nearly legal s21 checker. the s21 checker and looking at shelter 's advice