Property owners
We are known best for being the top HMO-specialist management and lettings company in Scarborough, with more HMOs under management than any other private lettings company in Scarborough, and a proud host of 5-star reviews from our clients and tenants on Google, TrustPilot and Facebook, (search for TWH Homes to read these, or see below for a small selection). We also manage HMOs in York, as well as non-HMO properties (“single let” flats and family homes).
HMO management
If you have an HMO property and you have had it managed by a third party in the past, you are likely to be one of the vast majority who have had a bad experience: managers not keeping you informed, poor quality tenants damaging your property, different rent coming in every week, not able to keep up with who is living in your house, missing compliance certificates and being horrified at the standard of the property when you make a visit. This can be heart-breaking if you have put love and effort into your property in the past, not to mention the impact to your wallet if you can’t rely on the income being consistent.
If none of this is ringing any bells, in our experience, you are lucky! But unfortunately we hear this time and time again. HMOs are not similar to single let properties. To manage an HMO effectively, you need a lot of experience, preferably from running your own HMOs. It takes years to learn properly, and the laws, regulations, licensing and planning considerations relating to HMOs are often new to regular property managers. But ignorance is not an excuse! Finally, as well as being on top of compliance and the technicalities of running an HMO, you really need to care about the property and the tenants. This is often the crucial missing piece of the puzzle.
HMO management is the main activity we do as a company, specialising in particular in HMO management in York and Scarborough. Since we have many of our own HMOs, and have been running them successfully for years, we know what matters to HMO owners, so we know how to make your HMO work from ownership, tenanting and cashflow perspectives. We are true experts in this field and have over 20 years’ experience. Our pricing is also transparent: we charge 14% of gross monthly takings and £300 per tenancy for tenant-find. There are no other costs and no minimum contract term.
We conduct:
- Gas checks every year
- Electrical Installation Condition Reports (EICRs) every 5 years
- Inventory management
- Weekly fire system testing
- PAT Testing every year
- Fire Risk Assessments every year
- 6-monthly fire safety certificates
- 10-yearly Energy Performance Certificates
- HMO Licence renewal reminders (we can prepare the application for you for an additional fee)
- Room-only AST management
- Free area rent demand testing
- Proactive amenity standard compliance
- Free cashflow analysis to highlight changes that could make a positive net income impact for you
- Routine inspections
We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, Property Redress Scheme, Client Money Protect, certified with the National Residential Landlords Association, and we hold comprehensive Professional Indemnity insurance. We do everything very much by the book, and furthermore, every month, you get a statement showing the takings for the month, our fee deducted, net landlord pay-out, and a list of tasks we have completed that month, so you can see exactly what is happening in your property. Please ask if you would like to see an example of one of these. Please also ask us to put you in touch with some of our happy customers so you can hear how we took all the worry and stress off their shoulders when they switched their HMO management to TWH Homes. We have some testimonials below.
Tenant-find service
We offer a tenant-find service (only for clients whose properties we manage). It’s £300 with no additional or hidden fees, and no ongoing contract. We invoice you when the tenant moves in so you don’t pay until you know you have a tenant. The fee includes:
- Advertising on multiple online platforms, (which normally include SpareRoom, OpenRent, RightMove, Zoopla, GumTree and so on)
- Initial tenant screening, (including database checking, online and social media research and collecting information from the tenant to determine whether they would be a good fit for us and vice versa)
- Viewings
- Collection of holding deposit, (which is later protected in TDS). We also offer a zero-deposit option called Reposit
- Credit checking, proof of income and our affordability calculator
- Guarantor collection and guarantor contract (if the tenant fails the credit check or affordability check)
- Reference from employer (or accountant if self-employed)
- Previous address history and reference from previous landlord, (or character reference if they’ve not rented before but since we don’t accept under-25s, most of them have)
- Verified ID and Right-to-Rent check
- Full application report available to you as a PDF with all the tenant’s information, past address history, employment information, emergency contact and so on
- Initial and ongoing rent collection
- Tenancy contract, (we provide a signed contract between the tenant and you, and we normally ask for permission to sign this on your behalf)
- We hand-hold the tenant through the entire process, with full transparency of the steps. We have a respectful tenant engagement style, which is something we proactively promote internally, and is evidenced multiple times in our many 5-star positive tenant testimonials on Google, TrustPilot and Facebook
- Check-in on the day of their move-in. This includes a New Tenant Checklist and inventory / schedule of condition, which they sign. The checklist ensures you are covered, by getting the tenant to sign to say they agree with a number of checkboxes, such as the existence of fire safety measures in the property, the receipt of all their compliance documentation like EPCs, gas certificates and EICRs, any house policies, fire alarm reset instructions, door locking policies, visitor policies, no-smoking policies and so on). For HMOs, we normally do room-only inventories, as multiple other tenants may be responsible for the condition of items elsewhere in the house
- All documentation is provided to you after the check-in, in our app called COHO
Single-let management
We also have a proud legacy of single-let property management, (e.g. self-contained flats and family homes, not shared houses). As with our own HMOs, we have also owned and managed our own significant single-let properties for over 20 years. For this, we provide all of the above where it relates to single let properties, and whilst we still charge £300 for tenant find, we charge a lower 12% of gross rental income for our monthly fee.
Please contact us to discuss our services if you’re curious, if you want to talk about your specific situation or if you would like to speak with some of our current clients. You’re also welcome to come round some of our properties to see how we do things before making any decisions.