As a landlord, have you ever faced a situation as dire as this?
Your letting agent moves a tenant into one of your properties and after a while they stop paying their rent then the tenant simply disappears. The letting agent lets you know that it is vacant and says they are trying to find a new tenant.
Meanwhile the next door neighbour breaks into your house and rigs up the electric meter in your house to feed their house with ‘free’ electricity with a cable through the wall.
The electricity supplier becomes concerned when their bills are unpaid and when the consumption starts to soar they decide to take drastic action and need to enter the property. The Police take a Section 80 possession and force entry into the property.
Shortly afterwards, the property is then broken into and every accessible metal item is stolen leaving a live gas leak.
A passer by calls the police to report a smell of gas; the police attend then break into the property again.
How happy is the landlord at this point? What are they feeling? What would you do?
What actually happened might surprise you.
An insurance claim was carefully managed to ensure that the property was fully repaired and reinstated. The next door neighbour was charged with multiple offences. No prizes for guessing who stole the metal and the ‘cannabis farm’ was closed down. (there had to be a reason for consuming over £20k of electricity in 6 months!)
The landlord was paid in respect of ‘Loss of Rent’ and the claim management team managed to assist the insurer reclaim the cost of damage caused by the police when they forced entry.
The property was then sold and the landlord recovered all his costs and even made a tidy profit on the sale.
Claims management by professionals really does work.
