If it were just a one-off needing to do a quick tidy and ten exit the property fir a couple of hours, that would be one thing - something you might well be happy to do for someone who’d been a ‘great’ LL. However, the key point is it isn’t that once marketing starts.
First you’ve got the agent coming to take photos. Then you’ve got multiple viewings…and anyone who is more interpreted wanting to do a second viewing. Each time, that’s at least a quick tidy round, and then especially over the summer holidays, given the agent has said they want the property empty for viewings, the need to organise to take the whole family out for probably an hour or two….where to exactly? Is that walking the streets? Going somewhere in the car? Spending money? Will it be finishing this week or go on through the whole summer holidays? It’s the open-ended nature of it that’s the problem.
So, if I were the OP, I would quite simply be saying, regardless of anything in the contract or that I’d agreed to previously ‘ Sorry but I won’t be accommodating viewings, certainly not during the summer holidays. My children are at home and we are not going on holiday so we need access to the house that we’re paying for and won’t be able to vacate so that people can be shown round’.
Again, this isn’t about ‘doing a favour’ or owing one to a ‘nice’ LL. LLs should be decent and provide a good service as a matter of course, because they are paid significant rents. It is a business transaction. The tenant doesn’t need to feel grateful and indebted to the LL for getting the service they’ve paid for. As I say, I’m a LL myself, and my view is that LLs get vacant possession before marketing. I have zero sympathy for anyone for tries to do otherwise and think no tenant needs to accommodate marketing - and that is the legal position.
So, if this LL has decided to sell for whatever reason, that’s fine. They can serve legal notice. They can see if the tenant vacates when that notice expires. If they do, they can then do whatever work is needed and then market it. Anything before that point is asking something if tenants which they are not required to provide and is a contravention to the quiet enjoyment of the property they have paid for and the LL has agreed to provide in return for rent. If the LL wants to offer the tenant reduced rent or some other benefit as recompense for doing viewings and the inconvenience caused, they can offer it and it’s up to the tenant to consider if they want to accept the offer. However, any suggestion that the tenant must accommodate viewings, or that they should and it’s the ‘right’ th g to do, or that a ‘great’ LL is somehow owed it, is daft and again, a failure to understand the position and rights of LL and tenant, but a sense that because the owner is the owner, somehow their desires and wants supersede those the tenant gains through the fact they pay rent and have a legal contract.
The trouble is that many people still think that LLs are doing tenants a favour by letting tenants live in their house. They think that even when a tenant is paying hundreds kr thousands a month and has a legal contract with rights to notice, quiet enjoyment, maintenance etc, because they do not actually own the property, the LL always has the right to visit at any moment, decide to sell and market at any moment and whether to maintain the property or not. They think that surely an owner should be able to sell THEIR property any time they wish or need to…becaue it’s theirs. They forget, that when someone pays a significant rent and signs a legal contract, they have bought rights and that the LL has to then wait for that contract to expire or to legally end that contract, so those rights no longer exist and they can revert to doing what a property owner without tenants can do. Quite simply, LLs cannot have their cake and eat it. Anyone who suggests tenants should pay their rent and then allow the LL to act as if they as tenants don’t exist, is placing the non-property owning tenant as some kind of lower-being and denying them the rights that their rent and the law gives them. People just need to think again and get the balance right in their heads.
When you rent your property out, you receive rent and in return lose the flexibility you had when you didn’t have tenants. That’s the ‘cost’ of the rent. LLs and the public have to accept that the 2 go hand-in-hand.