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 appendices to your tenancy agreement (our APTs now provide for this)
• 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, if you decide to use them, 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, and may 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.

• The Landlord Law APT agreements now include an option to include the procedures here as an appendix (without the contact forms)
• We also have an option to include the procedures as a separate standalone document.  This includes our contact forms – but you can also provide your own.    

If you are using the Landlord Law tenancy agreement, we provide, in the document generator form, wording for a clause which you can use to incorporate the standalone procedures document.  Or (if you do not use our tenancy agreements) you can use the wording below:

This help article explains how to add additional clauses to the Landlord Law tenancy agreement.