Property Management Tips for Landlords: Dealing with Dilapidations

Whether you have a single commercial property available for lease, or a wide variety of residential properties in your portfolio, you will need to deal with dilapidations. However, you already may have quite a lot on your plate to deal with (especially if you have a bigger number of houses under your belt) and you don’t want to make things more difficult for yourself.

This is where having a solid understanding of what dilapidations are can be pivotal, as you’ll be better placed to deal with them. To make sure you do have the right knowledge, take a look at this useful post, as below we’ve detailed what’s involved with dilapidations, why they can cause issues and how you can resolve them.

Dilapidations Explained

Dilapidations, or ‘exit costs’ are the costs that a tenant can incur after they leave your property. These are to cover the expense to you as the landlord (rather than you having to pay) for repair to any damage or replacements of furnishings, fixtures or fittings.

Typically, this will be something you have assessed and can range from anything like damage to units and cabinets, to stains on carpets, replacement of lightbulbs and even the maintenance of your gardens.

Potential Issues

While the above might sound fair to you, the potential issues that can arise can be that the former tenants of your property may feel that what you’ve found wasn’t their fault. Or they may refuse to pay the charges you’ve given them.

Following this, it can then mean you face delays in getting new tenants in, or it can mean that you have to foot the bill yourself and you may even end up having to take legal action to get the payment you want. Which, needless to say, can cause unnecessary stress and be a waste of valuable time.

Problem Solving

A good thing here is that there are plenty of ways to manage the situation. One method is to seek external help from specialists in this field. Companies like Allsop for example can help you by offering you insights on how to put the right steps in place to prevent these problems and give information on dealing with dilapidations. Equally, they can support you when dealing with claims.

The other course of action you can take to help prevent any issues is to make sure that any contracts or tenancy agreements you have make it clear for everybody involved how the property needs to be looked after and what the condition of it needs to be when tenants leave.

Lastly, you should hire an unbiased third party to assess a property to make sure what they uncover is fair. This way you can avoid being challenged on any apparent issues you would find, if you were to assess a property by yourself.

So, make your experiences as a landlord even more straightforward by taking on board this advice for a renovation too. Soon your property portfolio could be much easier to handle and any problems with dilapidations can become a thing of the past.