Who Are You Letting Your Property To?

A challenge that a Landlord can often face is - will your Tenant to take care of your rental asset? If you decide to rent your place, it is crucial to thoroughly check out your prospective Tenants, because you may not realise their intentions. They could be seeking to use your flat for illegal activities.  

Landlords do need to respect the privacy of their Tenants, but they need to be aware of their Tenant’s actions and need to be suspicious for any illegitimate behaviour. Police are warning homeowners of short let/holiday let homes to be aware of sex workers using their home as a pop up brothel. Many Landlord victims of brothels claim the Tenants seemed perfectly normal and that there had been no initial suspicion when first meeting the Tenant. Along with turning flats into temporary brothels, Landlords should also be suspicious of drug dealing and other criminal activity.

Victoria Whitlock from the Evening Standard recently wrote a story about a brothel scandal when her friend from north London had first-hand experience. The friend decided to let out her flat once she was married and was under the assumption she rented her home to two female students. Her Tenants seemed completely normal, until she decided to carry out a routine six-monthly inspection. She then discovered the flat to be completely empty excluding two beds and a chair. There was no TV, no kitchen utensils, no food in the cupboard, and no clothes in the wardrobe. “That was when I knew they’d turned the flat into a knocking shop,” she told her friend. “I was 100 per cent certain, there couldn’t have been any other explanation.” Her intuition told her that these girls were running a full-on brothel from her home.

As a Landlord, should you be worried about illegal activity in one of your properties, the police have comprised a list of six key warning signs for potential drug, prostitution and/or other criminal activity:

·  Potential Tenants who are willing to pay large sums of cash upfront to rent the property.

·  Tenants always being out or having a reason for not letting the Landlord or managing agent come over to the property.

·    Blacked out windows.

·    Laundry bags or excessive amounts of bin bags being left outside the property.

·    A pungent smell.

·   Signs that the electricity boxes have been tampered with, or excessively high         fuel bills.

We at Jeremy Jacob also want to offer our own tell-tale signs of a suspicious Tenant:

·    Tenants that offer little transparency with regards to referencing and further being not very open as a person (i.e. demonstrating traits of caginess or aloofness).

·      Tenants who have self-employed status without an accountant.

·      Tenants that will have different occupiers throughout a tenancy.

·    Prospective Tenants who don’t ask the normal qualification questions of the letting process of its agency.

·    Prospective Tenants who are a little quick and impulsive to make an offer on   the property.

So what should you do if you suspect your Tenant is selling sex from your property? Prostitution is not illegal in England if it is just a single person acting alone, but more than one person soliciting sex is considered a brothel and is illegal. It is also illegal for a landlord to directly profit from prostitution. Further to this, a Landlord increasing the rent after determining that prostitution is occurring could warrant prosecution due to living off the earnings of prostitution. But in the case of  the Landlord example from north London, it seemed likely that both girls were bringing clients back to the flat, which meant that they had turned it into a brothel — and it is an offence to own or manage a brothel.

In conclusion, if you suspect prostitution or any other criminal activity it is best to inform the police. As Landlord, you have the ability to evict a Tenant with a Section 8 notice. It’s of course always best to seek legal advice from a solicitor.

http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/renting/the-perfect-tenants-were-working-girls-are-landlords-legally-liable-if-they-discover-their-property-a111371.html