About ten years ago, we became involved in a problem at a property we didn't even manage. Base had originally found the tenant on a let-only basis, after which the landlord took over the day-to-day management themselves. The tenant subsequently stopped paying rent, communication between the two sides deteriorated and the situation had reached the familiar point where everybody could see where it was heading but nobody appeared able to change direction.
We contacted the tenant and had a conversation. There was no extraordinary property-management trick involved and no clever piece of legislation deployed. Once we understood what was actually happening, it became clear that the tenant's circumstances had changed and continuing with the tenancy wasn't realistic. We therefore helped the two sides agree an amicable early surrender, allowing the tenant to move back home temporarily while we quickly relet the property for the landlord, this time at a higher rent.
The story didn't end with the surrender. Over roughly the following 12 months, the former tenant repaid the outstanding arrears directly to the landlord. There were no solicitors, court proceedings or lengthy possession process, and the landlord didn't spend months watching the debt increase while waiting to regain control of the property. A difficult situation was resolved because, once people started talking properly, there was still enough goodwill and common sense available to find a solution.
After 22 years running a London letting agency, we've thankfully had remarkably few serious arrears cases. That experience has nevertheless reinforced something which can get lost when the landlord and tenant relationship is discussed purely in terms of contracts and obligations. If your tenant develops a serious problem, you can insist that their personal circumstances are none of your concern, but there's a fairly good chance those circumstances are going to become your problem too.
The rent is still due, but that isn't always the whole answer
There is an entirely legitimate commercial response to the story above. The tenant signed a tenancy agreement, the rent was due and the landlord had their own financial commitments. Why should somebody else's change of circumstances become the landlord's responsibility?
It shouldn't, at least not in the sense that a landlord suddenly becomes responsible for solving their tenant's personal life. Rent isn't optional because somebody has encountered a difficult month, and owning a rental property doesn't oblige you to become a bank, counsellor or social service. London landlords have mortgages, service charges, maintenance costs, tax liabilities and financial commitments of their own, all of which continue regardless of whether the tenant's circumstances have changed.
The difficulty is that being contractually right doesn't automatically tell you what produces the best outcome from the situation you're actually facing. A tenancy isn't an abstract legal relationship between two entities. There is a human being living in a very expensive asset belonging to another human being, and both sides can experience circumstances beyond their control.
People lose jobs, relationships end, businesses fail, family emergencies happen and sometimes people simply make poor financial decisions. Landlords have their own versions of exactly the same problems. The question for a good managing agent isn't whether those circumstances magically cancel contractual obligations, because obviously they don't. The useful question is what can now be done to protect the landlord's position while preventing a manageable problem from becoming unnecessarily destructive.
In our experience, deliberate non-payment by a tenant who is perfectly capable of paying and simply fancies keeping the money has been remarkably rare. Usually something has happened. The sooner we understand what it is, the more options everybody tends to have.
Problems get considerably worse when people stop talking
Communication sounds like a painfully obvious answer, yet its absence sits behind an extraordinary number of tenancy disputes. A tenant gets into difficulty, feels embarrassed or frightened and starts avoiding calls. The landlord sees rent missing and assumes the tenant is taking advantage. Emails become more formal, positions harden and eventually both sides are dealing with a version of the other person they've constructed from silence rather than the person themselves.
We've experienced the other outcome too. Back in around 2012, we dealt with a tenant where we repeatedly tried to avoid formal action. Rather than engage meaningfully, the tenant became increasingly difficult and eventually aggressive, at which point the range of reasonable alternatives narrowed considerably. We activated the rent and legal warranty we'd put in place, the landlord's arrears were covered and vacant possession was eventually secured at no cost to them.
From the landlord's perspective, the protection worked exactly as intended. The tenant, however, ended up substantially indebted to the insurance company. What stayed with me about that situation wasn't that formal action had proved effective, but how avoidable much of what followed had felt. There had been opportunities to communicate and find another route, but eventually those opportunities ran out.
That distinction matters because empathy should never be confused with endless tolerance. If somebody refuses to communicate, won't negotiate reasonably or remains in severe denial about a situation that plainly cannot continue, there comes a point where the formal route is the appropriate one. We are running a business and representing clients with substantial assets and financial commitments. Our willingness to work harder than most to find an equitable solution doesn't mean allowing a problem to continue indefinitely.
Equally, court proceedings in residential lettings can be slow, expensive and stressful. Even when a landlord is ultimately successful, months of arrears, correspondence and uncertainty can make a technically victorious outcome feel rather less satisfying in commercial terms. If a reasonable negotiated route can return the property sooner, reduce the accumulating debt and allow everybody to move forward, exploring it isn't softness. It is sensible property management.
The landlord is our client. The tenant is our customer.
This is probably the simplest way I can explain how we've approached residential property management at Base. The landlord will always be our client. They appoint us, they pay our fees and we have a professional responsibility to protect their interests, manage their property properly and give them clear advice. The tenant, however, is our customer, and I don't believe fulfilling our responsibilities to one requires us to treat the other as an opposing party.
Quite apart from the human argument, treating tenants badly makes very little commercial sense. A good tenant looks after the property, reports problems before they become catastrophes, pays their rent and may remain for years if the home continues to meet their needs. Eventually, when they leave, you want them to return the landlord's asset in good condition and feel that they were treated fairly while living there. Their experience of the tenancy has a direct relationship with many of the outcomes the landlord cares about.
That doesn't mean the interests of landlord and tenant always align. They plainly don't. Rent reviews happen, deposit disagreements occur, repairs can create disputes over responsibility and sometimes a tenancy simply needs to end. The role of a good managing agent is to occupy the space between those interests without pretending that everything said by the person paying the invoice must therefore be correct.
Sometimes protecting a landlord's interests means telling them something they don't particularly want to hear. We've done that throughout our history and, on occasions, we've decided that the gap between how a landlord wanted to operate and how we believed tenants should be treated was simply too wide for the relationship to continue.
One of the earliest examples involved enough money to make that decision rather uncomfortable.
Why we walked away from more than 200 potential instructions
Around 2007 or 2008, when Base was still a relatively young independent agency, we secured the exclusive business of a landlord with a portfolio of more than 200 properties. For a company of our size and age, this was an enormous opportunity. The potential fees mattered, but so did the stock, growth and credibility that could come from representing a portfolio on that scale.
We started with the first two or three lets and quickly discovered a problem. Tenants were moving into properties where works that had been agreed hadn't been completed. Homes weren't being handed over properly clean and, more fundamentally, the condition wasn't consistent with what we believed somebody should reasonably encounter when being handed the keys to their new home.
At that point we had a choice. We could focus on the scale of the opportunity and tell ourselves we'd improve things over time, or we could accept that the landlord's approach simply didn't align with ours. We chose the latter and walked away from the portfolio.
I don't tell that story because I think turning away business makes us morally superior to anybody else. It mattered because of when it happened. Compromising on those standards when Base was young would have made it considerably easier to compromise on them again later. Once you've decided that revenue justifies putting your name against something you're not comfortable with, the second compromise tends to become much easier than the first.
More than 15 years later, I don't regret the decision at all. Had we put the money ahead of the experience of the people moving into those homes, I don't think Base would have become the business it is today. More importantly, we'd have had a fairly difficult time looking those tenants in the eye while claiming we cared about the homes we were putting them into.
A good agent shouldn't simply agree with you
There remains an assumption among some landlords that the best managing agent is the one who does exactly what they're told. I've never really understood that. If you're employing a professional because they possess experience and knowledge you don't have, surely part of the value lies in their willingness to tell you when they believe you're making the wrong call.
After more than two decades managing London homes, we've watched a lot of tenancies unfold. We've seen landlords become entrenched over relatively small sums and inadvertently create a much larger problem. We've seen tenants panic, stop communicating and make their own situation dramatically worse. We've also seen landlords give a good long-term tenant a little breathing room and ultimately suffer almost no financial loss because the issue was addressed early and sensibly.
There are equally situations where patience stops being productive and formal action becomes necessary. The judgement lies in recognising the difference rather than applying the same response to every problem because a procedure manual says that's what happens next.
This is one of the reasons good property management remains such a human job. Systems, automation and good processes can remove an enormous amount of administration, but somebody still needs to understand context, communicate clearly and exercise judgement when circumstances stop fitting neatly into the expected workflow.
What COVID reminded us about renting somebody's home
I was reminded of all this during a recent Viking Chats conversation with Verona Frankish when we got onto the beginning of COVID and the extraordinary uncertainty of those first few days. One of our immediate decisions at Base was to contact our tenants. We couldn't tell them what was going to happen because nobody knew, and we certainly couldn't make financial promises on behalf of landlords. What we could tell them was that if their circumstances changed or they became frightened about their ability to pay the rent, they should talk to us and we would talk to their landlord.
It felt like the obvious response because people were suddenly confronting questions they'd never expected to ask. Would they still have a job? Would they receive a salary? Could they pay their rent and, if they couldn't, what would happen to their home? Sending everybody a copy of the relevant clause in their tenancy agreement would technically have provided information while being almost completely useless in addressing what they were actually worried about.
COVID was exceptional, but the principle wasn't. Property management is relatively straightforward when nothing goes wrong. The rent arrives, the boiler behaves itself, the landlord is happy and the tenant gets on with their life. The real value of an experienced managing agent tends to become much clearer when life refuses to cooperate.
Residential property has an unusual dual identity in this respect. To the landlord, a London flat may be one of the largest financial assets they own and a crucial part of their long-term plans. To the tenant, the exact same collection of bricks, fittings and expensive square footage is where they sleep, cook, work, entertain friends and live their life. Both descriptions are true at exactly the same time.
A landlord is entitled to expect their investment to be protected and the rent to be paid. A tenant is entitled to expect a properly maintained home and to be treated fairly. A professional agent should be capable of holding both thoughts in their head without believing that acknowledging one somehow undermines the other.
The tenant we helped in 2015 still owed their landlord money. Nobody pretended otherwise, and the debt didn't disappear because we approached the situation with empathy. What changed was the route taken to resolve it. The landlord recovered the property quickly, relet it at a higher rent and ultimately received the money they were owed. The tenant got the opportunity to move home, stabilise their circumstances and repay the debt without an avoidable legal battle making an already difficult situation substantially worse.
Not every case will end that neatly, and anyone promising otherwise hasn't managed enough property. Sometimes formal action is unavoidable and, when it is, a landlord needs an agent prepared to take it. The important thing is not to mistake escalation for effectiveness or assume that the hardest possible response is automatically the most commercial one.
When your tenant has a problem, their circumstances may not be your responsibility. Understanding those circumstances, however, might be the difference between resolving the problem and spending the next six months wishing you'd had the conversation earlier.
