Notice for end of tenancy

[JadeTurtle]

Hi,

Firstly apologies if this is in the wrong section - I couldn’t see one for renting.

We are currently in the process of buying our 2nd house (where we will be living; we sold our first house already). We are currently renting in between.

We are on a 6 month contract which goes to monthly rolling afterwards, with a required notice period of 1 month from either party. We’re currently in the 6th month. When we entered the house buying process, it was suggested/hoped by the vendors that we would complete by the end of November/first week of December. Currently we’re still waiting on the vendors’ solicitors to respond to enquiries, and whilst we have no indication of any major problems at the moment, we’re starting to get a bit twitchy about whether completion in the first week of December is now feasible.

Our tenancy renews on the 12th of each month so realistically if we want to be out by 12th Dec and pay no further months rent, we would need to serve our 1 month’s notice today.

If the purchase goes through as planned, this will be fine. If not, we may have to rescind our notice/have to request a further month in the rental. Our landlord is currently marketing the house for sale so I can’t see him wanting to rush another tenant in after us.

If we don’t serve notice now, and the house purchase goes through ok, we’ll be paying rent for a month more than we need to while the property sits empty.

Is it reasonable to give tenantive notice but ask if we could have the option to extend if anything goes wrong with the house?? Or do we really need to commit and just accept we might lose a month’s worth of rent if we’re out by early December.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you 🙏

I don't see why not. I've done this before - contacted landlord and gave notice, but then paid pro rata for two weeks or so when completion was pushed back. You might like having a week or something in-between, it makes moving/cleaning rental for deposit and any renovations in new house easier

When I moved from rented to bought, I really didn't want to give the landlord notice until we exchanged, just in case it all went horribly wrong. So we exchanged just before ( I think it was 1 day before) the rental period ended, and then set the completion date for 2 weeks later, so we had 2 weeks of both properties. It meant we could do a proper clean of the new place, move in (ourselves, no removal firm) and clean the old place before handing back the keys. It worked well, is that something that could work for you?

(Also, I may be wrong, but if your rental period renews on the 12th, did you not have to give notice yesterday, before it renewed?)

I’m not sure about the exact timing - I know 12th December (when the next lot of rent is due) is more than 30 days away, including today, but we have been in talks with him for the last few days about it. Just hadn’t sent anything formal in writing yet. Hopefully he isn’t too pedantic about the timing, it’s a private landlord and it’s all been done rather informally so fingers crossed. 🤞😬

An overlap would be handy, but if the house purchase goes ahead as planned, we’ll already have a 7-10 day overlap. If we don’t serve notice then we’ll have it for another month so basically 5-6 weeks after we got the keys to the new place.

Once you have given one months notice your LL does not have to allow you to extend but may be ok with it. All you can do is ask. LL will say yes or no.