Anyone have any experience of letting out their family home for a few months?

[thebellsofsaintclements]

We are going abroad to visit family abroad for a couple of months this summer, and i was thinking of letting out our home on a short-let basis.

We could really do with the cash (and I know you can fet more for short term lets) but am a bit worried about our home being trashed/people leaving the heating on all day and night, etc.

Anyone have any good/bad experience with this? We are in London zone 2 by the way, close to Canary Wharf so am hoping for a company to rent our house to (rather than, say, tourists).

TIA

I did this last year, also London zone 2, it was fine, no nightmares, PM me if you have specific worries. I would say you can't be too specific about your type of tenant.

We let ours to one set of tenants for just over 6 months, so a bit longer than you are talking about but they managed to trash our wooden kitchen worktops and blocked the drains. I don't think they cleaned at all. The damage wasn't too big a problem for us as the income was well worth it and we are re-doing the kitchen anyway. Just bear in mind if you have any rental-inappropriate finishes in your house like wooden worktops! Factor in the cost of a cleaner before you get back too!!

Thanks guys, that's really helpful. Can I pls ask which agencies you used? Was it special 'short-let only' ones, or regular ones (like Foxtons etc) which also do short lets?

I let it myself through gumtree and a couple of other websites. We were going to go with an agency but the two good local ones started hemming and hawing about how very difficult it would be to get a tenant for only six months etc etc so we did it ourselves and ended up getting much higher rent (20%) than they had suggested with none of the associated expenses. We had a ton of people apply so we could pick and choose and ended up with four reasonably mature professionals.

That's really good to know - ta!