“What does the ideal London tenant look like?” asked one of my landlords from Chelsea the other day, to which he carried on before I could reply, “Let me guess, a professional couple, both in their 30’s, flawlessly tidy, pay their rent early, don’t complain or fuss, have no plans to move and cheerfully accept annual rent rises?”
Before I can answer that question properly, I have always believed all a property landlord in London wants and expects of their tenants is for them to pay their rent on time and look after the property as if it were their own. Our London property agents carefully screen tenants.
In return, the property landlord should provide a property that is warm, clean, and sort any issues such as repairs quickly and without fuss. Our property management services in London deliver this, of course, to save investment landlords time.
Back to the tenants – tenants tend to fall into several groups: 20-something professionals; young and middle-aged families; corporate tenants (i.e. their employer finds their employee a house to live in); students; older singles/couples and housing benefit claimants – and in my experience as a letting agent in London they all come with different needs and wants.
So choosing who best suits your London property to rent – and steering clear of bad tenants – is a big factor in making property investment a success.
One topic that I am often asked as a London letting agent is should they, as a property landlord, accept tenants on housing benefit?
It might interest the landlords of London that of the 40,401 private rented properties in the local council area, 28.5% of the tenants of those properties are on some form of housing benefit – that’s 11,518 properties.
I know many property landlords have suffered late rent payments with tenants on benefit, especially since 2018, when local authorities started paying housing benefit to tenants rather than directly to the landlords.
But you can’t ignore the fact that housing benefit tenants make up a significant proportion of the London private rental sector population.
My opinion as a leading letting agent in London is that the final choice of accepting such tenants has to be the landlords but you can’t tar every tenant with the same brush.
Interestingly, it might surprise some readers of my London Property Blog that when we compare London to the national picture, London’s Housing benefit claimants are lower, as nationally a higher proportion of private tenants claim the benefit.
Nationally, 39.2% of the tenants of the 3,891,467 rental properties in Great Britain claim some form of housing benefit (i.e. 1,526,915 properties).
Now, let us look at the occupations of London rented property tenants, which makes even more fascinating reading.
Of the 40,401 privately rented properties in the London area, 31,741 head tenants (the head tenant being classified as the head of the household) are in employment (the other 8,660 rental property head tenants either being retired, long term sick, students or job seekers).
Splitting those 31,741 head tenants down into their relevant professions, 16,428 of them are Managers, Directors, Senior Officials, Professional or Technical Professions, 2,872 in Administrative and secretarial occupations, 2,607 in Skilled Trades, 2,183 in the Caring, Leisure and other service occupations, 2,509 Sales and Customer Service Occupations, 1,532 Process, Plant and Machine Operatives and finally, 3,610 in Elementary Occupations.
The one thing I have always known anecdotally, but until I did my research and never had anything to back it up with, was the high proportion of professionals and skilled trades renting property. Our London property agents carefully vet all tenants, of course.