Tenancy deposit arbitration or ADR – help at last!

Are you a landlord? Have you had a dispute over a tenancy deposit go to arbitration? Did you lose when you felt you ought to have won? If so you are no longer alone. Tom Deritt of ADR Solutions, who contacted me recently, is on your side.

ADR stands for Alternative Dispute Resolution also called arbitration. One of the selling points of the new tenancy deposit schemes, was always the free quick and easy arbitration service.  No more time consuming and expensive county court claims.  A quick ADR with your answer back in a couple of weeks.

But after an experience of the ADR procedure, many landlords are not happy.  We have featured quite a few of these complaints on the Landlord Law Blog.  However a big problems is that many landlords do not appreciate that the starting point for the arbitrator is that the tenancy deposit is the tenants money not the landlords, and they also do not understand what they need to do to prove their case.

“Until recently” Tom told me, “I worked as an adjudicator for one of the deposit protection schemes. I found myself increasingly concerned at the number of cases where I suspected that the landlord or agent probably deserved the money they were requesting, but where I couldn’t award the full amount because the evidence submitted did not justify the claim.

Only this week, My Deposits announced that landlords only succeed or partially succeed in 51% of cases. The figures unquestionably show that in 49% of disputed deposits, the landlord comes away with absolutely nothing. I don’t accept that in half of the cases referred to ADR, the landlord does not deserve anything at all. “

So he decided to do something about it.  The result is a new web-site www.adrsolution.co.uk, where, for as little as £50 you can get Tom, or one of his colleagues, to check over your paperwork (as all these cases are decided just on the paperwork) and advise whether or not you have a good case.

Sounds like a good idea to me (although not perhaps if the disputed sum is only £4.20!)

What do you think?  Is this service going to provide a need among landlords?  Please let us have your comments.  And if you use the service, let us know how you get on.

I have recently been told about Tenant Txt, a web-site which landlords (particularly those with a large number of properties, and social landlords) can use to contact their tenants.

The landlord signs up to the web-site, and also signs up his tenants. They say whether they want to be notified via text, email or twitter. Then every time the landlord wants to notify them about something he can do this via the tenant txt website.

The site suggests that it can be used to remind tenants of important maintenance repairs, alert people if there is crime in the area, and inform tenants of community events.

If as a landlord you send out a lot of paper notifications to your tenants, this will certainly save you money on paper and postage, and therefore could be worth trying. With the higher subscription prices you can also use it to alert your office and maintenance staff.

There is an initial free trial period, and after that you have to pay. The prices are in American dollars as this is an American site, but that does not mean it cannot be used for British properties. If you try it, post a comment here and let us know how you get on.

While doing some writing for Landlord-Law I discovered that the new Equality Web-site is live. This was set up by the Equality Act 2006 which also set up a new Equality and Human Rights Commission. This will deal with discrimination over all areas, rather than, as before, just concentrating on specific areas such as race, and disability. The act also gives the commission power to make regulations regarding other types of discrimination, such as religious belief and gender.

The three earlier commissions, The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), The Disability Rights Commission (DRC), and The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) have now been merged into this new organisation, which has a web-site at www.equalityhumanrights.com. Any attempt to reach the old web-sites will just take you here.

It is a very clear web-site. All the fussy content of the old sites is gone. Anyone searching for information about their rights will find it quite easy. There is also a section for advisors which, again, is very clear, if rather sparse.

In fact the whole site has a ‘light on content’ feel about it, perhaps because it is so new. I spotted a A-Z index at the bottom but this just lead me to a registration page. It was extremely irritating however, having registered, to be told that access was denied and that the page had been disabled! (Was it because I said I am a lawyer? Am I being discriminated against?)

Still, if you are looking for information on any sort of discrimination this is a good place to start. Although like most sites aimed at the general public it is rather light on authorities.