Simon Lambert

And I know that whilst tenants are often painted as the blameless victims in this, it's not always quite so cut and dry.

And in fact, there are many, many cases where tenants cause a level of damage to properties that the deposit comes nowhere near covering, right?

So that's what you want to avoid as a landlord.

That kind of damage or that kind of problem or people not paying their rent, and that does happen more often than you think, and also void periods.

And the way that you do that is by looking after tenants.

And then you keep your tenants for a long time.

And actually, this is where the Renters' Rights Act is a good idea because realistically...

You know, as a landlord, you don't want to be having to renew the tenancy agreement every 12 months.

When we talk about mortgages and I talk about why taking a five-year fix is a good idea, I always say it's because two years comes around incredibly quickly.

Well, if you think two years comes around quickly, just you wait till you find out how quickly one year comes around, you know.

Yeah.

So and that works both for landlords and for tenants.

It's a nightmare, as Helen said, like, you know, all of a sudden you feel like you've only just moved in and then, oh, my God, 12 months is up.

And now they want to put up the rent or actually they're saying they want to let out someone else.

They reckon they can get more money from renting out someone else and so on.

But it's the same for the landlord.

You know, they're like, oh, Jesus, it's another round.

And then the letting agent charges them a fee and so on and so on.

And so what you want actually is a situation of stability from the landlord's point of view.

So I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.