It’s Important To Inspect Your Buy-To-Let Property

Here’s a friendly reminder for all landlord’s to regularly carry out inspections on their properties. Unfortunately, it’s easy to slip into a mindset of a lazy relaxed landlord. A lot of landlords are kept satisfied as long as their tenants make their rent payments on time. If only life was so easy. Sadly, “collecting rent” is only one out of several duties that a landlord should be obligated to perform.

Inspection of your property is probably one of the more important tasks that every landlord should perform on a quarterly basis. For those that have letting agents fully managing their properties, they probably do the inspection for you (I hope). I hate to go off on my usual rant about the inadequacies of letting agents, but you know, they don’t always do the inspections, even though they’re meant to. But hey, that’s just from my experience. Basically, just make sure thorough inspections are made on a regular basis, even if that means you have to do it yourself- Imagine that, a Landlord taking on responsibility.

I’ve always performed inspections quarterly for the following reasons:

• Receiving rent alone isn’t satisfying enough. If my tenants have inflicted damage- i’ll be out of pocket regardless of paid rent.
• Tenants won’t care about your property as much as you will, so you might spot something unacceptable which has been neglected. Remember, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
• It’s easy to become so immune to a problem that it becomes more of a characteristic than a problem. For example, your tenant might be accustom to the smell of dampness, however, you might notice it straight away.

Now, here’s a real life example demonstrating why my words shouldn’t land on deaf ears. I read this article the other day on the Cannazine website, Landlord finds 100k worth of cannabis plants in buy-to-let drug factory. Just for clarification, I’m not a regular reader of a website that focuses on illegal drugs. I swear.

Here’s the basic rundown of the article:

Buy-to-let landlord John Leaver went to do a spot of maintenance at one of his properties, he expected the garden to be a bit untidy. That’s when Johny discovered that his property had been turned into a cannabis factory.

The sitting room and two of the bedrooms were carpeted with hundreds of plants with a street value of £100,000, while the rest of the property was being used to store tons of fertiliser.

The kitchen had been turned into a bedroom and living space for the “gardener”, who fled when the landlord arrived. There were 50 huge ultra violet lights in the rooms, each with its own newly-fitted power socket.

It is estimated they were using £100 worth of electricity each day although the meter had been bypassed to avoid payment by drawing power straight from the mains supply.

“We agreed a rent of £650 a month. The rent was paid into my bank account on time and there were no reports of any problems.”

Well, if that’s not a perfect guide on how to setup a cannabis factory, I don’t know what is. All you need is cannabis seeds and/or plants, UV lights and fertiliser. Lovely. Maybe us landlords are in the wrong game?

What I foundrather odd, well besides from the elaborate, strategically formed drug-yard, is that the landlord popped around to do some maintenance work. From what I understood, he didn’t even inform the tenants, it was just a out of the blue visit. May I just remind my readers that I wouldn’t advise random visits without giving tenants 24 hours notice and confirmation from the tenant; otherwise you do actually invade their rights as tenants. But anyways, it paid off for Johny to make his random, non-legit visit. How ironic.

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