Question

Changing the Rent (England) | Tenancy Agreements (England)

Rent increase and new AST?

15 Sep 2017 | 4 comments

My tenants have been with me 9+ years, On an AST, have had a couple of rent increases previously and I have then issued a new AST (at tenants’s request) with new agreed amount. We have just agreed another rent increase and tenant has again asked for a new AST. Am happy to do this (good tenants), however have suddenly worried that maybe I shouldn’t have been doing this re: new regs/ deposit rules etc. Deposit is still with DPS (where was originally lodged in 2008), am I ok just to issue a new AST, or am I creating problems? I know I could do an addendum, but at same time I am also happy to fix them in for at least another 6 months so I also have security of new AST. Thoughts please!

Answer

4 Comments

  1. guildy

    If everybody is happy with a new tenancy, that’s absolutely fine.

    As long as it was protected correctly and all prescribed information given in full when first received, all renewals are deemed to have had prescribed information served and protection to have continued.

    However, to be safe, we would recommend doing the prescribed information again when doing a renewal.

    Also, because this renewal is after October 2015, you must supply the how to rent guide, EPC and gas safety with the tenancy.

    As long as you use our Tenancy Builder, everything is done for you except you need to insert the EPC and gas safety.

    • sjcollett

      Thanks have now done this – and warned the tenant not to be worried by the huge size of the new ast!

      By the way, I do think it would be good if you could upload automatically into the tenancy builder the gas cert and epc – maybe that’s something that could be looked into in future revisions?

  2. jay jay

    Hi Guildy
    what would be the best way to correct the address of the rental property on the AST -instead of 2A it went through as just 2…
    there is a guarantor in place as well, and all other documents have the correct 2a on them

    thankyou
    Jay

  3. guildy

    We’re not sure how essential it is to change the address because presumably the tenant is in occupation now and knows their address is 2A not 2. As such, we don’t see how the mistake is causing any issue to the tenant.

    However, it could become problematic if notice were ever needed because the notice wouldn’t match the tenancy. Like above, this might not be disastrous but would be better to be fixed at some point.

    Although we don’t normally like doing renewals, perhaps in this case, if everything is fine at the time of the end of the fixed term, a renewal could be done which corrected the address at the same time.

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