national association of letting agents
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Latest property news
Former MD of troubled estate agency Humberts joins presidential team of NAEA
The NAEA and ARLA have both ushered in their new presidential teams following the Propertymark annual general meeting and dinner at London’s Savoy hotel on Friday, including the appointment of Ian Westerling (pictured, right) as Vice President of NAEA. Ian recently stepped down as Managing Director of Humberts after the ailing firm was sold to a travel company, and now holds a ‘special projects’ role at the company. He is joined by Mark Bentley (pictured, left) of Birmingham agency Paul Carr who replaces outgoing President Katie Griffin, and Lauren Scott of Whitley Bay firm Trading Places (pictured, below) who is now President Elect. As well as looking forward to meeting the fellow member agents, Mark says he also wants to work “with the Propertymark board in encouraging the government to move forward with their indicated intention to look to regulate the sector and to find a way to speed up the house buying and selling process”. ARLA ARLA’s new team at the top is Peter Savage (pictured, left), who is now the organisation’s president, replacing Sally Lawson. Peter has been ARLA president before during 2015/16 and is chairman of Oxfordshire lettings agency Simplify Housing, the website for which was…
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Latest property news
Rent Smart Wales: 75% of letting agents not licensed yet
Three quarters of letting agents in Wales have not signed up to register with the country’s compulsory licensing scheme for agents and landlords, even though there is just two and a half weeks to go before it starts. The warning comes from a ‘concerned’ Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) as the deadline looms for agents and landlords alike. “If landlords and agents find themselves unlicensed when the deadline arrives on 23rd November they will be unable to practice, so it’s important to act soon,” says David Cox, ARLA’s managing director. After the deadline Rent Smart Wales will responsible for policing the country’s rental market through a licensing system for agents that requires them to complete training and then get approved by the scheme. Landlords must also undertake the training if they wish to self-manage their properties, or alternatively use a licensed agent if they do not want to do the training. Also, anyone renting out a property in Wales must comply with the new regulation regardless of whether they live there or not. ARLA, which runs one of the Rent Smart Wales-approved training courses via the NFoPP Residential Letting and Property Management qualification (Levels 2,3 and 4) says it reckons…
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Latest property news
NLA takes Housing Minister to task over buy-to-let tax “tosh”
Changes due to be made to the UK’s buy-to-let tax rules will push over 400,000 basic-rate landlords into a higher tax bracket, says the National Landlords Association (NLA). This is more than the ‘small’ number the government said would be affected by the changes, which severely reduce the mortgage interest payments and other finance related costs landlords have been able, until recently, to deduct from their business costs before declaring their taxable income. NLA chief executive Richard Lambert has described the government’s claims that the changes will have a low impact as “complete tosh” and has met with Housing Minister Gavin Barwell to discuss the problem. Lambert urged the minister to consider amending the rules to reduce the impact on landlords and that this could be “easily achieved by applying the rules to only new loans written after April 2017”. “Unless this happens, landlords will face an impossible decision of whether to increase rents and cause misery for their tenants, or to sell-up, and force their tenants to find a new home,” he says. Landlords operating on only small profit margins are likely to be the ones most worried by the tax changes, which the NLA estimates will increase the…
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