UK Landlord Forum / Life

My future student tenants have signed and scanned their tenancy agreement before posting the hard copy back to me. But there are no original signatures from the tenants, just scanned ones. Their witnesses and guarantors are overseas and again I have scanned signatures. So I guess it's all been done by email etc between them.

How legally binding is a tenancy agreement with scanned signatures?

Many thanks!

Presumably you'll have the wet signatures when the original hard copy comes back?

As the tenancy agreement was emailed to everyone that needed to sign it, no I won't have the 'wet' signatures. (Two of the students families live in Bhutan)

If there's a scanned document containing a signature, it's proof that the document was signed, which should be enough to make the agreement. It's a proof that the signatory has agreed the content of the document. It's like a photograph showing that something was in a particular state, even if the original is not available for some reason.

Which would probably be good enough for an English court deciding something that relied on the document being signed.

But it's not the actual signed document, it's a facsimile of it.

But it sounds like that's the best possible result.

Thank you, that is the clarification that I was looking for 

Just to add I switched to using signable a few years back & it really makes the whole signing process easier not to mention saves on pages & pages of A4 paper.

I would strongly advise against agreeing to Guarantors who live abroad, just how are you going to enforce that liability to them in the event of rent not being paid?

Quote from: Pinkwindsor on January 24, 2024, 02:42:49 PMMy future student tenants have signed and scanned their tenancy agreement before posting the hard copy back to me. But there are no original signatures from the tenants, just scanned ones. Their witnesses and guarantors are overseas and again I have scanned signatures. So I guess it's all been done by email etc between them.

How legally binding is a tenancy agreement with scanned signatures?

Many thanks!