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Fair Fees Forum calls time on weak lettings industry regulation

Meeting of NALS-organised group says it's time to put and end to rogue agents, tenants and landlords.

Nigel Lewis

The time for stronger regulation of the industry to stop rogue agents, landlords and tenants has come, says the Fair Fees Forum set up by the National Approved Letting Scheme (NALS) last year to tackle the threat of a letting fee ban.

These should include, it says, better and more consistent Local Authority policing of the industry, tougher measures for rogue agents and the accreditation of referencing companies to help prevent bogus and repeat-offending tenants.

The announcement followed a meeting held on Wednesday in a secret location attended by representatives from many of the industry’s leading firms including the three deposit schemes, NALS, RICS, the RLA and agents Chestertons, Countrywide, Hamptons, Spicerhaart, Winkworth and Connells Group.

Fair Fees Forum

The main problems that the Fair Fees Forum identified include patchy and sometimes non-existent policing of rogue agents, landlords and agents which has led to a regulatory housing ‘postcode lottery’ in the UK in which different authorities apply different resources to enforcing existing housing industry regulations.

Members of the Fair Fees Forum also want there to be greater effort to bring rogue agents either back “into the fold” or to permanently exclude them, rather than the current system of patchy temporary suspensions that the main member organisations apply.

In February the Association of Residential Letting Agents criticised the government’s planned banning orders for agents and landlords as being “completely illogical and defeat[ing] the purpose of the legislation” because only local authorities and government officials and not tenants.

But the Fair Fees Forum also called for referencing companies to become accredited. Many landlords have complained in the past that tenants who have passed referencing turn out to have form of not paying rent or damaging properties.

And the Fair Fees Forum also called for research into how the regulations of other housing markets around the world work including in Australia and the US, and for the industry to focus harder on education landlords and tenants about best practice and standards.

June 16, 2017

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