Tips On Tenancy Deposit Disputes 24: Claiming For Your Time

Tip 24: Claiming for your own time

This is an issue that crops up time and again; how to claim for the time and effort that you have personally spent working on a property. It’s perfectly alright to expect compensation for your own effort but, as with everything else, your claim will be assessed on how reasonable it is.

If you are claiming for your time, keep an accurate record of how many hours you worked and send that in. Invoicing yourself for your own work never looks convincing, so just give the adjudicator the information to make an informed decision. Your hourly rate can also be a contentious issue. The amount that you claim needs to be a competitive rate for the job that you are doing, and should not be a direct reflection of what you could have earned if you weren’t working on your property. If you are a brain surgeon or a partner in a commercial law firm and you value your time in the hundreds of pounds per hour, the adjudicator will expect you to get someone else to do your painting and decorating for you. The best claim is one that supplies evidence that the hourly rate claimed was realistic.

Equally, claims for travel expenses are acceptable if within reason and backed up by evidence, however, I have seen claims from fly-to-let landlords living in the Mediterranean for the cost of return flights, with a week in the UK, to attend to some minor damage in the property. If you live abroad, or even just a long way from your rental property, it will be much more difficult to argue that your travel expenses are a reasonable cost to pass on to the tenant.

Tom Derrett is the Principal of Deposit Claim, an experienced deposit protection adjudicator and an expert on the Deposit Protection Schemes. Tom helps landlords to claim money through the deposit protection schemes.

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