Managing rental property is going to become more complex when the Renters Rights Act becomes law and comes into force.

However, you can make things a lot easier for yourself if you have standard procedures to follow, particularly in difficult situations.

You can then focus on following your procedures rather than worrying about what to do and starting from scratch each time a similar situation arises.

Incorporating your procedures into your tenancy

You will need to inform your tenants of your procedures, as they will be for them to follow as well as you.  There are various ways you can do this:

• They can be set out as appendixes to your tenancy agreement
• They can be set out in your ‘House Rules’
• If you have a landlord’s website, you can put them there with forms they can complete online

Whichever method you use, the procedures should be incorporated somehow into your tenancy agreement and your tenants put under an obligation to use them.

Contact forms are a good idea as they make it a lot easier for your tenants to follow your procedures.

You can provide your tenants with paper forms for them to fill in and send, or scan and email over to you.  However, most tenants will not have a scanner, will not want to use the post, and so will appreciate an online form.

This will be easiest for you to provide if you have a website.  For example, if your website is a WordPress site, you can use plugins such as Gravity Forms (which are useful for a variety of purposes).  Or you can use a free service such as Google Forms.

Then you can send out a standard email to tenants that includes links to your forms.  For example, a link to your online procedures could be included in your email signature.

You may have your own ideas about how to incorporate your procedures and procedure forms into the tenancy.  We would love to have your feedback and ideas to improve this procedures section.

When our tenancy agreements are updated to take account of the Renters Rights Act requirements (once these are known) we will be including an option to incorporate procedures into our tenancy agreements.  In the meantime, here is a clause you can adapt and use:

We explain how to add additional clauses in the Landlord Law tenancy agreement in this help document.

About the procedures

We have developed a number of procedures for you to use.  You can use them as they are.  However, do feel free to adapt them to suit the way you work and run your properties.  Regard them as a starting point.

There may be other procedures you will want to use, or you may already use other procedures of your own.  If so, please let us know and we can either create a new procedure for you or (if you are willing) make your procedure available for members to use!

Then, if you are part of a larger organisation, you may also want to create your own internal procedures for your staff to follow.  For example, a procedure to follow for keeping records.  If you would like us to draft a sample procedure, let us know.

You will find the current procedures listed on the index.