A Chinese man outwits us
Sunday, October 27, 2013 @ 4:00 PM
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Tenant: Chinese man called Cho.
Rent: £190 per month, with half-rent of £95 from mid-June to mid-September.
Duration: one year.
(various additional tenants moved in and out during the course of this year, with Cho the only constant one – for 3 months over the summer he was the only tenant)
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At the time Cho was a tenant, the mortgage was £600 a month, with only one room occupied for three months over the summer, at a half-rent of £95 a month. We made the mistake of leaving all the other rooms unlocked to facilitate viewings and later discovered that Cho had family and friends staying there most of the time. As we were very hands-off at the time and were spending a lot of time away, and because he had seemed so pleasant (he gave me a Chinese fan one day, to butter me up) we would arrange for him to show around any potential tenants, so that we didn’t have to go to the trouble of finding and paying someone to go to the house to do the viewings. Surprise, surprise those who viewed the house never took a room. Cho was then able to carry on benefiting from the entire house himself (he could have been charging rent to his friends and family for all we knew).
I started to suspect he wasn’t what he seemed when, one day while I was at the house, he said:
‘It’s good you have the £95 coming in from me each month, isn’t it? At least you get £95 profit every month.’
‘How silly of him,’ I thought, ‘to assume we pay no mortgage, water rates or other costs and that the princely sum of £95 is for us to spend on ourselves.’
But we had a mental block, refusing to budge from the notion that it was a student house, because that had always been the case; if one professional moved in, council tax would have to be paid and that would screw up the whole let and make us liable to pay another £900 a year. It took a while to realise that the situation was unsustainable and we would have to let to ‘professionals’ or unemployed and pay the council tax ourselves (or include it in the rent, if possible).
When this light-bulb finally went on and we realised we would never get another paying tenant unless we gave Chinese person his marching orders, we did just that. We knew that letting out the rooms individually in that area would be a high maintenance solution, but the alternative was to leave the house empty or with one or two student tenants if we were lucky.