So your letting agent in London has found a tenant for your property and you are about to handover the possession to the tenants through the agent. The agent has assured you to pass on the keys of the house to a new family who will stay in your home as per the lease agreement, as certified by the letting agent. Well, this is like recruiting a new cook in your restaurant without having tested his culinary skills! Now that’s a complete risk. So why take a blind step when it is your property in question?!
A piece of real estate in London is one of the prized possessions anyone can probably have. It is a great idea to involve a letting agent or a good property management service so that the entire procedure of starting a tenancy becomes smoother and less cumbersome for you to handle it alone. But sometimes these services involve an additional gesture of the “we-do-it-all-for-you” approach. While this is a great thing when it comes to screening of tenants and arranging viewing of the property, the key to a great tenant-landlord relationship is to meet your prospective tenants personally.
You might wonder who anyways needs to maintain a relationship with the tenant when you have an agent taking care of it all. But the fact is that a good professional relationship and rapport go a long way especially when there could be a possible dispute or disagreement about anything. Moreover, you are the best judge of your property and the people that you would want to rent your property to. That doesn’t mean that the agent is an unworthy resource to hire. The kind of knowledge that the letting agent can share about the property and the local area around it is definitely worth it. In fact you must benefit from their expertise when it comes to knowing more about the real estate and rental market, paper work, rent collection and much more. But meeting the tenant yourself is an important task and you must make sure that you do that.
Meeting your tenant is important for many reasons. One, you get to know the people better who will stay in your property and also take care of it, at least when it comes to handling the property and the stuff inside it in a wise manner. Two, you can set the expectations right, both regarding what you are expecting from them as tenants and what they should expect from the property. Accuracy and transparency of information is more likely to be present when you meet and interact directly with the tenants. So make it a point to fix a meeting with the prospective tenants so that you know who is going to get access to your property.
