Landlords have recently become concerned about renting their properties out as social housing, especially as in the upcoming months the way that housing benefits are paid is changing so that the money will no longer go directly to the landlord, but to the tenant who will then have to pay the landlord themselves. Meanwhile, the government is urging landlords to consider entering the social housing market, however many are wary about the consequences of renting out their properties to the most vulnerable of families. One landlord from Croydon has recently found that a property he rented out to social housing tenants was ransacked before the tenants vacated the property, and claims that it is situations such as this that puts landlords off of renting to social housing tenants.
Mohamed Shabir, said that he didn’t know “whether to laugh or have a heart attack” when he saw the state of his three bedroom property after the tenants had left, and said that it would cost up to twenty thousand pounds to repair. The damage included the floorboards being ripped up so the tenants could steal the copper piping, the boiler being torn from the wall and stolen, doors pulled from their hinges, furniture trashed, and the gas metre stolen. Examples such as this highlight the importance for social housing landlords to have proper landlord insurance to make sure the damages can be fixed.
Discussing the destruction of his property, Mr Shabir said: “All the time you hear that tenants get a bad deal from their landlords – but this is the reality. It has happened to me four times now and I can’t let it happen again. I’m not the only person this has happened to – it happens all the time. The council says we should take on more council tenants, but this is what happens when we do.”
To make matters worse, Mr Shabir has not been able to contact the woman who previously lived in the property as she has moved to a woman’s hostel. He said that he was disappointed with the turn of events, and “I thought I was doing a good thing – giving a home to a vulnerable family – but this is how I am repaid. What they [the council] need to do is make the tenant responsible for their actions. They have to warn their tenants that this kind of behaviour is not acceptable. If they are going to do something like this, the money should be taken from their benefits. If there was going to be a real consequence for them, they would soon stop doing this sort of thing.”