As all Welsh landlords should by now know, Welsh housing law is changing tomorrow, 1 December 2022.
One of the big changes, which I have written about on here before, is the Welsh ‘occupation contracts’, which need to be used now instead of tenancy agreements. They are MASSIVE as they contain so many prescribed clauses.
You also need to be careful how you use them.
If you give a fixed term, as I said in my last post, they will convert to periodic tenancies after the end of the fixed term, stripping out all the changes you may have made to the prescribed terms in the meantime.
Unless your fixed-term contract contained the terms of any subsequent ‘potential’ periodic contract.
Developing a Landlord Law Welsh Occupation Contract
I have actually been working on a Landlord Law contract for some time, and had loaded up some drafts which people could use (by copying and pasting the text) onto Landlord Law for my Welsh members.
However, I was not happy with them.
So yesterday and today, I have been developing a new version which is now live on the site and which can be created using our online ‘Document Generator’.
This version:
- Is a fixed-term contract – so this means that your tenants cannot up and leave until the fixed term has ended
- Contains all of the prescribed terms (largely unaltered) along with my additional terms to protect the landlord’s position
- It also contains details of the terms of any ‘potential’ periodic contract which may be created if tenants remain after the end of the fixed term. Meaning that you won’t have the problems I described in my last post.
Naturally, it is very long, as there are an awful lot of prescribed terms along with other information which needs to be included.
Our contract will probably work out at about 30-32 pages which sounds an awful lot, but if I compressed it any more, it would be almost illegible. I was also unhappy about reducing the content, as if an ‘incomplete’ contract is provided to contract holders/tenants, it makes the landlord vulnerable to the penalty.
So it is dangerous to have ‘reduction of paper’ as your main driver as proper terms and conditions are needed to protect landlords.
And, assuming you allow it to run on as a periodic, you will only need to serve it once.
How can you get hold of it?
If you are a Welsh landlord – this is probably the agreement that you want.
It is only available to Landlord Law members – but members can use it as often as they like.
There is no need to sign up for an annual membership if you don’t want one. The monthly membership starts at £25 pcm, and you can cancel your membership whenever you want.