An uninsured landlord’s claim that his letting agents should compensate him for more than £220,000 in losses has been largely turned down by a Scottish First Tier Tribunal – although the agents and their company were found to have broken code of practice requirements and were ordered to pay a total of £16,000 in compensation.
The case concerned a house let by first-time Glasgow landlord John Brown. He had been going abroad for a year and had wanted to let his six bedroomed house for £1,800 a month.
A complication was that the letting agents who had found a tenant for the house, Alan Bates and Kevin Valentine, had changed employers, setting up their own business between first meeting him and letting the property.
It was not disputed that Brown had told them there would be locked room in the house in which he intended to keep valuables.
Subsequently it turned out the tenant was using the property to grow cannabis. He caused substantial damage to floors and walls and broke into the locked room.
This all became clear when the police were called in by Brown in July 2019. He had previously expressed concerns to the agents but no action had been taken.
Brown said the cost of remedial work needed to put right the damage had been estimated by a contractor at £65,968. He had in fact made the repairs himself because he was uninsured and did not have the money to act otherwise. Even so, had been forced to have an electrical contractor make repairs at a cost of £4,500.
In addition, he said the valuables that had been taken from the locked room had a value of £158,395.
Brown claimed he should be compensated by the agents who, he claimed, had not exercised due diligence concerning the tenant. The agents disputed this, saying they had made ‘industry standard’ checks. And the tribunal agreed that what they had done was reasonable.
An application for compensation was not the same as a contractual claim, said the Tribunal.
Because the agents had been unregistered, compensation was due. However, the value of the stock and possessions in the locked room had been disputed and there was only the landlord’s evidence about had been in there. There had been no corroborating evidence and nobody who gave evidence, other than the landlord himself, had seen what was in the room, no inventory had been carried out of those contents. Therefore the amount claimed by the landlord could not be awarded.
