Anybody got any scary rental stories- Mum needs to move on from family home

[anastasia74]

Recently lost my lovely dad. My mum doesnt want to live in family home on her own and wants to live quite near to me.

As the selling market seems quite slow. I suggested renting until market picks up. Any advice, warnings etc Thanks

Just to add. She would need to rent out family home in order to afford renting herself.

I'm surprised to hear this, a lot of people are after family homes.

I have got one scary story for you. We used to rent a house that appeared to be illegally sublet council house. Council came to check and found out us living there and not their tenant-our landlady. By that time we had done some refurbishment to the house because we liked there. Obviously we had to leave? (long and nerve-wrecking story behind that, when our ?landlady? found out and blamed us for ?disclosing? the truth and then changed the locks so we could not enter the house and she could pretend she was living there? wheewww).
Rent through an agency, it is safer.

Forgot to say, we did not know that we were renting a council house - we were told the landlady was the owner.

Take out landlords insurance on the house you let out, don't bother with an agency they charge a fortune and then take the tennants mother as a reference, not a guarantee but a reference ffs, credit checks aren't worth the paper they are written on.
If you expect it to be a nightmare then you'll not be too surprised.

anastasia74 - I have rented for 25 years and am seeing a lot of 'former family homes' coming up for rent where the elderly owner is unwilling/unable to sell.

The problem is that very often the owner cannot afford to bring the home up to the modern standard that many young families want.

Letting aganets will not tell your Mum what I have just said and many older owners get very offended when I asked if they would paint over pattered wall paper and allow me to put plain carpets down at my own expense.

I do not want to sound rude and your Mum's house may actually be very clean and tidy and up to date but if it is not it may hang on the market and she will get more and more distressed. A lot of agents take on these types of lettings in the hope the owner will get desperate enough to agree to them putting it on the selling market in 6 months time.

The market won't pick up, all the 'increases' have been artificially created by low supply of decent houses.

So I wouldn't hold on.

We rented between houses last time we moved. Through an agency, who quite reasonably carried out a credit check on us.

They didn't, however, do the same for the landlords, who had legged it to the USA owing tens of thousands of pounds to the VAT, council tax, utilities and the holders of both(!!) mortgages on the house.

The owners also hadn't consulted the holders of the second mortgage, who when they found out about it gave us until the end of the month to leave; fantastic security of tenure there, then. At this point we consulted a solicitor, who sorted out that we stayed to the end of the tenancy and expedited our house purchase so that we had somewhere to go to.

If I ever rent a house again I will get my solicitor to check out the owners and the agency before I go anywhere near moving in. And it will be worth every penny! And that is my advice to any prospective renter.

Thanks everyone for your advice.

I think in the long run we are going to have to make the improvements to bring it bang up to date. Kitchen/flooring etc. to make it sell as quickly as possible.

It will break my heart to see someone else living there (if it ever gets sold) my dear dad built it.

but mum is so unhappy/frightened on her own there, and that is the main consideration now.