UK Landlord Forum / Life

Hello new forum member here.

I would like some advice please on the situation I find myself in.

My Uncle passed away last year and I am administrating his estate through probate which has been granted to me. Part of his estate is a flat with a tenant. He has had the same tenant for the past 9 years, there is no property agent involved.
I have gone through all his paperwork and I cannot find any tenancy agreement that is in date.
I have met with the tenant, she is nice and has kept the flat in good condition and has swapped over payment of the rent to my probate account that I have set up to manage my uncle's cash. As she has had some personal issues with her now ex husband and has a young child and is paying the rent etc, I have not pushed to get her out but I have explained to her that some point in the future I will need to sell the flat and distribute the funds to the persons entitled to it. One of the issues here is that my Uncle never put up the rent in the 9 years so what she can get for the money she pays is not as good as she has got.
She said she has also paid a deposit but I have no paperwork.

What I need to understand is what is my stance legally ?, how much notice do I legally have to give her ?. I would like to come to some mutual agreement rather than force her out.
Also how can I find out about any deposit ?
Is there a process that I need to follow ?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Gosh, there are a lot of things that you do need to sort out. I don't know the answers, sorry but the first thing I would have thought would be to ask if she has a copy of the tenancy agreement and deposit paid. The type of tenancy agreement itself would normally dictate the method and timescale of notice given. You may have heard about potential issues with 'unprotected' deposits but double check the year that this rule came it because it may be after the tenants moved in. I also seem to recall reading somewhere that if the Landlord died all sorts of 'different' rules apply to tenants in situ.

1. Not having a tenancy agreement that is "in date" doesn't matter. When a tenancy agreement ends it moves to SPT (the same terms and conditions). Maybe the last dated tenancy agreement you found is actually the last (it could be the only one ever signed) and if so then that is the tenancy agreement that is valid (it's just called an AST with a fixed term, it's called a SPT).

2. Following on from that - the notice period for SPT is "at least 2 months from Landlord to Tenant" and "at least 1 month" from Tenant to Landlord.

3. The regulations about deposits came in well over a decade ago, 2007, so your uncle should have followed them. If that was not the case things then could get tricky / murky / expensive.

4. If you want to sell, then the fact that there has been no rent rise for some years is not an issue (to you), but could make things hard on the Tenant (well, not hard on the Tenant, difficult for the Tenant). However, I would certainly advise some kind of mutually beneficial exit from this tenancy - the last thing you want is to find out there was a £1,000 deposit paid in 2009, there have been numerous renewed tenancies in that time, and no deposit was ever protected - that could be a big pay-day for the Tenant (assuming liability through death ends up falling to the estate - I have no clue on that front) so softly-softly-catchee-monkey I feel. Try to end this tenancy on good terms.

5. You can try to find out if there is a deposit that's been protected by researching the Deposit Protection Schemes and then going to their websites and keying-in the details they'll ask of you - it'll quickly tell you... if your Uncle just pocketed it into his bank account you'll find it much more difficult to validate how much it was beyond the Tenant telling you a figure, then searching for that incoming... if he did it all in cash, you probably have no hope whatsoever.

Good luck.