On Dealing With the Landlord Of Your Office

Whenever you're having problems with the office space you're renting from them, you are obviously reliant on the landlord being co-operative. In the vast majority of cases, landlords are responsible, and are not only fully aware of their responsibilities (after all, you should have a contract with one another that outlines responsibilities of both tenant and landlord), but they're ready and willing to fulfill those responsibilities when called upon. In fact, good landlords often replace features like boilers around the office long before they start causing problems - giving their tenants a trouble-free experience.

Having said that, there are landlords who are reluctant to meet their responsibilities when problems arise. Tenants can feel stuck in such situations. Who do you turn to when the boiler isn't working, and the landlord simply isn't willing to do anything about it, or forever delays repairs to the point where you realise they're just not going to get done.

The first thing you have to do is establish it's the landlords responsibility to carry out the repair. Secondly, document your initial contact with the landlord reporting the problem. It's always a good idea to use email as a means of communication in that respect - then you have an easy and concise way to prove your initial report of the fault. Of course, you need to give the landlord a reasonable amount of time to respond before taking it to the next step. The you should also highlight the part of your contract detailing the landlord's responsibilities to fix faults and repairs too. If you have any other evidence, such as photos or videos of the item that requires repairing/replacing, they may well support your case.

What happens if I take my landlord to court?
Quite often the threat of court is enough for the landlord to act and get the fault fixed. If the landlord still fails to act, then you may well be entitled to compensation if you win your case. You can be compensated for a number of things, including if you've been made ill or suffered an injury because of the fault, if you've had any items of your own damaged due to the fault, or were limited in such a way that you couldn't use certain features of the property because of of the fault (or inconvenienced in other ways).

Going to court will require an independent Chartered Surveyor to check the property and the fault - this will be used as part of your case against the landlord.

Of course, court action is a last resort. When you correspond with your landlord, always be polite and courteous, but on point with your concerns about a particular fault. As mentioned earlier, the vast majority of landlords are helpful and responsive to such requests.


Article kindly provided by pilkingtonshaw.co.uk

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