I hope the talk was helpful to you.  I mentioned a series I did on tenancy agreements earlier this year – you can find this here.

Looking at the program, the main theme is the future, with talks and panel sessions looking at proposed legislation changes and future trends. The speakers include Ian Austin MP, Caroline Davy of Shelter and Ian Potter of ARLA, along with Simon Gordon and David Salusbury of the NLA. It should be an interesting event. NLA are a good organisation and do a lot for their members, for example the recent undertaking obtained from the Conservative Party on payment of local housing allowance.

Mind you, the NLA is not the only landlords association around, and those in the Eastern Counties looking for an organisation to join may also want to consider the Eastern Landlords Association, plus there are others, either nationally or in other specific locations. However, the NLA is now the largest, particularly after its recent merger with the SPLA.

If you attend the NLA Conference, I would be interested in your feedback, so please do leave a comment below.

I arrived at about 3.30pm, so was able to talk to a few people before doing my talk (Essential Legal Points for Landlords). So I chatted with the staff from Alan Boswell, Richard Bowser, editor of Property Investor News Magazine, and a young man from Legal4Landlords. I was delighted to learn that he and his colleagues regularly check up on the law with Landlord Law, but taken aback to learn that they are not members! Maybe I should make my free tips less informative! My talk went reasonably well, with some good questions afterwards.

After the talk I did a bit of a wander. It was particularly nice to meet up again with Tom Entwistle of the excellent LandlordZone website. We were both attending the Landlord & Buy to Let Awards dinner that night as we had both been Judges. Also at our table were Simon Gordon, Head of Communications of the National Landlords Association (NLA) and the glamorous Sussanne Chambers, director of the NLA. It was nice to have an opportunity to talk to them, and it was a good evening.

It was also interesting (having been involved in the Judging) to see who won. The awards were announced by Konnie Huq, a television presenter. I don’t watch a lot of TV so had not seen her show, however she was charming, gave a very nice speech, and did as good a job as one can of reading out all the information about the awards winners. At our table we thought it might have been nicer to have the winners go up and receive their awards personally after they had been announced, however that was not her fault. The winners got the chance of having a picture taken with her afterwards, which I suppose will be a longer lasting memory (and one which will no doubt go up on many of their websites).

Unfortunately I failed to make a note of the winners as they were announced (too busy chatting) but I will do a link to the winners list once it is available. (NB – a list of the winners has now been published via here.)

On Saturday my talk was at 11.00am (Dealing with Rent Arrears) which went off fairly well. One of those attending was Liz Mooney, landlord Support and Development Officer at Sandwell Forums, and it was very nice to talk to her afterwards. She edits the newsletter, ‘The Bugle’ – I have not read it properly yet, but flicking through I see that one of the articles is headed ‘Another Senior Moment’. Glad its not just me then.

So thank you to the organisers, and apologies to anyone I spoke to who I have not mentioned here. But feel free to add a comment and remind me! Or just give comments on your experience of the event generally. I would welcome your views. And for those who attended the talks – did it meet your needs, and are there any other talk topics you would like me to do in future?

Particular thanks go to Derek and Andy of the Eastern Landlords Association for giving me a lift down there (when Andy confessed to being a Nearly Legal fan).

Those present at the event included the fabulous Sally Chicken, Director of the Rainbow Saver Anglia Credit Union Ltd, Jim Broadbent of Coastal Homeless Action Group, and of course various bods from Waveney council itself.

Huge apologies to any who were disappointed that I did not do the talk at 11.00 (not my fault), however hopefully those who attended the later one found it of interest. Many thanks also to all those landlords who attended and came up to talk to me, in particular the two gentlemen who attended my talk and who spoke to me just before I left, and the software engineer with the funny name (you know who you are!).

I was able to keep up with the email and forum posts during the day, courtesy of the macbook and the Apire wi fi, but there will still be quite a bit of catching up tomorrow …

Next event is the Landlord & Buy to Let Show in Birmingham next week.