QUESTION 1:
My tenants didn’t pay the rent last month. What should I do now?

ANSWER:
The first thing is not to panic. With luck it could simply be a mistake and a few phone calls will sort things out. But if your tenants are deliberately refusing to pay for any reason you need to act fast, but carefully. Best advice from experienced landlords is to keep communicating with your tenants as much as possible. Find out what the problem is and try to reach an amicable solution. What you can’t do is hassle or effectively harass your tenants. Nowadays all tenancy agreements should be legally watertight and you can get more details on how they should be structured by downloading the leaflet: ‘Assured and Assured Shorthold Tenancies - A Guide For Landlords’ from the Government’s www.communities.gov.uk website. By not paying rent your tenant is likely to be breaking the terms of the agreement. But if you also break the terms by dealing with the problem wrongly you can make it harder to evict them or to reclaim unpaid rent. Handling everything on your own and without proper advice can turn what could have been a short term hassle into a long-term crisis. So step carefully.