Property available for a fixed term of 10+ months from 4th September 2019, but prospective tenant wants it from 9th Sept until “September 2020”.
I’m willing to wait the extra days for the tenancy to start, but what I’m not wanting is for tenancy to run to that equivalent week in Sept 2020.
This is because even the very start of September is late in the year, for that particular market. Most enquirers are looking to move in in July/Aug.
An AST must end on the day before a rent day, here, 8th Sept 2020. I was hoping to issue a 10 or 11 month fixed term AST ending in July or Aug and not letting it run on to a periodic tenancy.
I could stipulate a rent day other than Day 1 of the tenancy but I prefer to receive rent in advance. Advance rent might even be a requirement if I were to take out a rent guarantee policy.
Other than the tenant agreeing to leave on 8th August 2020, and so an 11 month AST, I can’t see another way around this.
Any ideas please?
1 Comment
12/07/2019 11:45 pm
You can have an AST for any length you want – a few days, several months or months plus a few days.
You’re right that it’s always better the fixed term ends the day before a rent is due but that’s for when it goes periodic because you want the periods of the tenancy to match the rent days for simplicity. That being said, it’s not a law or anything so not the end of the world if the last day was different.
Our tenancy agreements on the Builder are geared up especially for what you need.
With our agreement, you don’t specify a number of months or anything. It has a start date and an end date so can literally be whatever length you want.
In order to align the rent with your last day, you can utilise the first FULL rent payment field.
For example, let’s say someone wants to move in on the 15 July but we want the rent to be payable on the 1st of every month, we would do the following for a roughly 9 month tenancy:
Fixed term from: 15 July 2019
Fixed term to: 30 April 2020
First FULL payment of rent: 1 August 2019 (and thereafter 1st every month).
Notice the last day of the term is set to be the day before a rent is due and the first FULL rent day is as it sounds – it’s the first day when the FULL rent is due. You can still ask for rent from 15 July to 31 July as an apportioned amount, this line is just aligning our full rents for us. This gives us a 9.5 month tenancy which is fine and when it goes periodic at the end of the term, the periods flow nicely with the rent.
As a side note, you mentioned abut not going periodic. It’s impossible for an AST not to go periodic if the tenant were to remain in occupation after the fixed term (from 1 May 2020 in our example above). There’s nothing you can do about that as it’s law but as you well know students will generally leave by the last day without fuss so it’s not really a problem in that market.
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