better to rent out our house privately or with an agent ????

[ljs]

We will hopefully be moving out of Dulwich and up to Derbyshire in the new year. We are wanting to rent out our house in W Dulwich and so I'm trying to gather as much information as possible about how best to go about renting the property out..

Has anyone had a good experience with letting through an agency or privately ??

Many thanks.

[silverfox]

ljs, I'd advise renting it through an agent. The agent would assume the burden of the landlord's obligations, certificates for boilers etc, deal with contractual matters. They will charge you of course, but if you're in Derbyshire it will take a weight off your mind.

[tllm2]

I'm afraid I'd advise completely the opposite - have used several letting agents over the years, all pretty much the same. They have certainly not offered us any confidence at all in the tenants found (who have mostly turned out to be very nice), but the references in advance were so vague as to be meaningless and whilst I can understand that you might consider the distance a problem. With a laptop and the internet you can sort out most tenants problems from afar. At least then you don't run the risk of being ripped off twice, once by the letting agent and then having no choice but to use their tame (usually OTT) tradesman for any problems that arise.

[louisiana]

I used a letting agent in East Dulwich. They put in a tenant from hell, having not checked anything. Not only was the tenant from hell being chased by several utility companies and most of the councils in London... but the agents would ring me up when she complained (for example) about a light bulb blowing. Complete nightmare.

Same thing happened with a different agent, on a different property, in East Dulwich. The tenant used a fake name, was not what he said he was, and nothing had been checked. Turned out he was a bailiff magnet (again, offences from across London), and in the end was being chased by the Met Police for alleged GBH on a bus driver in Brixton, amongst other things. Needless to say, when I re-occupied the property I had a trail of bailiffs turning up at my door, plus the Lambeth police sitting in my kitchen. It took me considerable time and effort to expunge the black mark over my property. (And this bloke is still using this as his driver registration address unfortunately, as DVLA will only change vehicle registration on my say-so, not driver - only he can do that, and of course he won't, for obvious reasons.)

All the private lets I've done have been fine.

[EDKiwi]

I'd be inclined to go private, we rent our place in NZ (luckily my parents take care of most of the issues we have with the place) but while renting we were never very impressed with the agencies we came across, and have found the same here in the UK. I'm sure there are some good ones out there but most we have encountered seem to charge the tenants and landlords large fees yet do very few inspections and seem to take ages to sort out maintenance issues (and I tend to sort out most minor stuff myself).

My suggestion would be if you decided to go private is sort out a local trusted handyman (I sure there's plenty of recommendations on here) who can sort out any issues that come up with your place and leave a set of keys with a friend, and most importantly make sure any tenants are properly reference checked.

[wee quinnie]

We rented our gaff a few years ago through a letting agent, and, whilst to a large extent I think it was a bit of money for old rope. since with a little bit of preparation, you could do all of the checks yourself. However, none of my private ads met with ANY responses from prospective tenants, but I did get a few annoying calls from other agents offering to let it out for me. Doh!

However, some of the services the agents offer, you can undertake to do yourself - like property imventorying (Which is really boring, I have to add). Also, you would probably be quite successful in re-negotiating their percentage.

Whichever you decide - good luck.