Do you know for certain that your tenancy documents are up to date? Do you know if you serve the move-in documents to your tenants in the correct sequence?
As a landlord who has been renting to tenants for over a decade, I thought I knew this business like the back of my hand. That was until I discovered an error I had made that could have had negative legal consequences, and I was mortified. With that discovery, I rushed off to ARLA/Propertymark to study for and sit the Lettings Agency exams, and thank God I did.
Although I found I had gained extensive legal knowledge of our property and landlording industry over the years, my studies also unearthed many little areas where I wasn’t quite doing things right. One of which was the exact sequence for the service of documents at the commencement of a tenancy.
Making a mistake with this can potentially cause a lot of unnecessary stress. If you don’t serve the correct documents to your tenants at the correct time at the commencement of the tenancy, you risk not being able to rely on your ‘Security Blanket’ (Section 21) to evict troublesome tenants. It’s so important to get this stuff right – not just for you, but also for the benefit of your good tenants who might be stuck living with a nightmare housemate.
Then it hit me that, if I was getting this wrong, then it’s likely there would be others who were making these mistakes too – so I’ve written this article to help all you self-managing landlords out there to protect your best interests.
How to serve documents to your tenants at the commencement of the tenancy:
Privacy Notice
The sequence to serve all required documents on the tenant actually starts pre-tenancy – with the Privacy Notice. Okay, so strictly speaking, the Privacy Notice has no impact on whether you can issue a Section 21 successfully or not, but since the tenants do need to view a copy of it at the commencement of their relationship with you, and as close to the moment when you collect their personal data from them as possible, I thought I’d throw it in here.
It’s best to provide a copy of the Privacy Notice at the same time you give them the application form to fill in. You can keep a copy of the Privacy Notice on a PDF document that you email to the prospective tenant, or keep a copy on your website and direct your applicant to the relevant page to read it.
If you don’t already have a GDPR compliant Privacy Notice, we recommend you join the RLA and download the template they offer to their members. You will still need to complete a data audit in order to fill in the blanks on the Privacy Notice template. We’ve written a guideline on how to conduct a data audit in our post GDPR – 7 steps to landlord compliance.
Gas Certificate, EPC certificate*, and the How to Rent Booklet
These documents must be served BEFORE the tenancy commences. We serve these documents before the tenancy agreement is signed, then have a check box on the AST that the tenant must tick to confirm they have been served each of the documents. The How to Rent booklet must be the most recent edition available. In the June 2018 edition, it states the booklet must be served either as a hard copy or, if the tenant agrees, via email as a PDF attachment.
* EPC certificates do not need to be given to HMO tenants, but many HMO landlords issue them regardless as there is a general fear that judges do not know the law around this detail!
Prescribed Information, the T&C’s, and the Deposit Certificate from the deposit protection scheme you use.
These docs must be issued to the tenant within 30 days of receipt of the deposit money, so if the tenant made their balance payment one week before the tenancy was due to commence, you would have to count 30 days from the payment date, not the move in date.
We serve the Prescribed Info and the T&C’s together with the tenancy agreement, which just leaves the certificate to be delivered to the tenant as soon as it is issued by the deposit protection scheme.
For added certainty, many landlords and agents also send hard copies of all of the documents in a Welcome Pack after the tenants move in. We display all of the documents in the tenant dashboard area of the management program we use, and also hang framed certificates in the houses too.
If you bundle the serving of the documents in the same way I’ve described above, then it’s just four, easy-to-remember steps that you need to follow in order to stay compliant.
1 – Privacy Notice (with application form)
2 – Gas & EPC certs and the How to Rent Booklet (before AST)
3 – Prescribed info and t&c’s (with AST)
4 – Deposit cert (when issued by deposit protection scheme)
Make a habit of correctly serving the move in documents with every tenancy. You will then have security in the knowledge that you are able to issue a Section 21 notice on a tenant if the need arises, without concern that it might get thrown out of court.