Ending rental period - help please.

[poppynic]

We are coming to the end of the second rent agreement for the property we are in. The landlord's agent has told us he wants to put the rent up again, this time by another £45 per week. This is too much for us and we have offered to pay an additional £20 per week. The agent has said this isn't enough and has tried to get us to agree to leave at the end date on the agreement. Do we legally need to leave on the date at the end of the agreement or is it the case that they need to serve us a notice of two months? Any assistance appreciated - especially as we are seeing a possible alternative property at 11.15 today. Thanks.

you need to leave by the end of the agreement. the 2 month notice period applies to other times.

...you could hold tight and wait for the eviction notice though I guess - that would take another couple of weeks. but some landlords get nasty if you do that.

How you actually manage it depends on how you are going to get rehoused- if you're after another leased house then realistically you want to be out on the end date, for references etc. If however you want to be rehoused by the HA, then they often expect you to wait until the eviction notice- if you're thinking about that, try the Shelter helpline.

£45 is quite a weekly rise!

Is there such a thing as a rent ombudsman or someone who can assess and decide if this is an unfair rise and maybe mediate for you?

CAB possibly?

I am sure they should be a claus in your agreement which will state how much % they are allowed to rise the rent each year, mine was by 2% i think, have you looked on your contract? £45 a week is quite a big rise.

I think the landlord still has to serve you with 2 months' notice if he wants you to leave at the end of the tenancy term (if it is an assured shorthold tenancy) otherwise the tenancy just rolls over and becomes a periodic tenancy.

Check with CAB. Your local authority has a rent officer and a officer who helps with problems relating to private tenancies, as well as local authority ones. Not sure if he can mediate in rent disputes, but it's worth checking.

There is a mediation service- saw a leaflet alst time I was at the CAB, there may be info on the CAb website you know.

OK, habve looked at our periodic contract: they still ahve to give us 2 montsh notice even if its the end of term (And we still would have to give them one months notice).

Dont know if that applies to all, but worth checking out I think.

We recently moved out of a rented property, they had initially told us we were to just let the tenancy roll over and it would carry on, but after we complained about things that needed fixing landlord decided to sell up, he still had to give us two months notice, even though the notice date was a month after our original end of tenancy.

There is legally a certain amount of rent that can be charged per property, I would do as everyone else suggested and call CAB.

Also check for any minute things in your agreement you may have missed, apparently our agreement stated we had to employ a cleaning company or clean the house, we cleaned it from top to bottom, including carpets, landlord came in three days later and ripped everything up and started work on the house, yet we are being told we have to pay for a cleaning company!!!

Make sure anything you are told you have to pay for, ie damage deposit/cleaning is mentioned to the agent BEFORE they engage someone to do these jobs, you are legally allowed to check they find the best person for the job and can disagree with anything, unfortunately our agents ignored our phonecalls/messages/emails for four weeks after we left, and I only managed to find out what was going on because I went round to the old house and spoke to the landlord. (our childminder lives next door, so I knew the landlord was there)

Hi, thanks everyone. Good news - when our agent told our landlord we would rather move than pay the extra he must have mentioned to our landlord who we are and our landlord told him to "keep the tenants" - woohoo. Sooo, we have agreed to a £10 pw increase.

On the aspect of the two months notice, on signing our new agreement we noticed that they also get us to sign a document under the Housing Act saying that we have hereby been given two months notice and will need to leave at the actual date of the contract (although they don't seem to give us a copy of that one .. hmmm).
Anyway, it's a relief to not have to move.
Thanks for your help.

excellent news, poppynic.

I didn't know the 2 months applied to end of contract time though. You learn something new every day.

RE rent rises - I'm not sure if the fair rent officer's decisions are legally binding or not, but it's an irrellevance really because the landlord can simply give the 2 months notice at any time and get tenants who will pay the higher rent. the free market is king, remember. It's one of the things that fuels house prices and it's wrong, but tenants aren't big news politically. It makes my blood boil.

There. I feel better now.