Honourable and personal residential letting experts

We serve notice to tenants on behalf of our landlords to regain vacant possession of their property in only 11% of tenancies – the rest of our tenancies (89%) are ended by the tenants.

Providing you have a correctly structured tenancy and properly communicated all relevant information at the right time to your tenants, then the Law currently allows you to serve a Section 21 “no fault” notice to gain possession of your property without providing a reason.

You may also end a tenancy by serving a Section 8 notice for breach of tenancy. This is more complex. For details please see our handling problem tenant webpage.

Whatever notice is served the fact is some tenants understandably do not want to leave the property they consider to be their home. This means they can react badly once they are served notice; previously perfect tenants can change totally. This means they may start to be un-cooperative, (e.g. not allowing access for viewings or inspections) or they may withhold rent or fail to leave the property at the end of the tenancy.

Whilst the Law and our tenancy agreements provide protection against all these issues, court action may be required to enforce compliance.

In our experience things work best when all parties work together, particularly where landlords understand the disruption and cost faced by their tenant as a result of notice being served. Clearly this is easier to do when there have been no concerns about the tenant or their treatment of the property.

However where tenants are difficult this can lead to uncertainty and stress whilst you wait to see what your tenant may do. Often you will need to wait until they day the tenancy ends before you know whether they will leave, and there is little you can do before then other than wait. In the meantime, it is essential to diligently follow your obligations under the tenancy to prevent providing tenants with justification for any action.

Despite this the good news is that you usually can get the property back when expected.

What are the chances of having a problem?

Over the last 3 years of the properties managed by us where landlords served notice to end the tenancy only 0.8% of tenants needed legal action to remove them from the property, and only 1.4% failed to pay the bulk of their rent.

We have a webpage covering what happens when tenants fail to leave a property.

Summary

There are some risks to serving notice to end the tenancy. Whilst these are usually relatively minor it is important to consider these and allow some contingency when deciding to serve notice to end a tenancy.