Tenants charter - mortgages the key

The one sticking point of the 'tenants charter' is that many buy-to-let mortgage companies will not allow tenancy agreements of over 12 months.  The exceptions are The Mortgage Works Paragon, and Woolich that all allow longer lets.

The remaining lenders generally limit tenancy agreements to 12 months.  This puts a big legal constraint in the way of Pickles masterplan for a longer term tenancy agreements meeting the demand from longer-term renters.  There are now an estimated 1.3m families living in the private rental sector.  Currently the average length of an AST is about 9 months.  Despite this  a recent YouGov survey of 2,300 tenants found that 48% of respondents over the age of 45 agreed on the need for longer term tenancies.

The big issue for landlords is to what degree the aspiration of Eric Pickles to provide for longer term tenancies will come from encouraging mortgage companies to be more flexible and to what extent it might derive from additional legislation to force landlords to accept a tenants request for a longer tenancy.  I'm thinking that the 'tenants charter' is meant as a sounding piece to find out the strength of public opinion from both landlords and tenants.  Obviously, I've not got a problem with longer term tenancy providing with the fact that landlords NOT tenants have the final say over whether they go down this route.  Otherwise, the essence of the Assured Shorthold Tenancy will be dead - a retrograve step for landlords and the private rental sector.  If you have a view I suspect that not only other landlords but Eric Pickles and his cronies will be listening.

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