Tips to buying online tenancy agreements

Buying an online tenancy agreement can be a challenging task, especially if you are a first time landlord or are new to purchasing legal documents online.

 First and foremost, allow plenty of time to research and buy forms, as if your tenants move in without signing a good quality tenancy you could find that you or your property are not legally protected.

Before buying an agreement you need to decide whether you are going to search for tenants yourself or you are going to use the services of a letting agent. If you opt to do the work yourself you need to fully understand the legalities of tenancies. If you are unsure or do not understand how landlord and tenant laws work you may prefer to use the services of an estate or letting agency. Make sure you enquire as to whether they supply and complete the agreement forms for you. As once you have bought and downloaded digital forms you are usually unable to return them.

There are numerous online legal document stores from which you are able to download and print tenancies. You even have some well known high street shops selling agreements on and offline in local outlets. So how do you know that the forms you download are worth the paper they are printed on?

In the majority of cases you have no real way of telling the tenancy agreement you are about to purchase is good or bad. Most agreements are pre formatted with no means of changing the clauses or even guidance to allow you to tailor your tenancy agreement to your own circumstances. Many are out of date due to clauses being challenged in court and have been found unfair and non-enforceable. For example you could state “pictures not allowed to be hung on walls”. This clause could be challenged in court with the argument that the tenant has the right of enjoyment of the property. As long as the walls were made good at the end of the tenancy, the landlord would not have any grounds to with hold or make deductions from the deposit.

When looking at potential downloadable tenancy forms ensure there are recently updated clauses, guidance notes to allow for easy completion and customisation, that the agreement has been checked or approved by a solicitor or barrister, has references to tenancy deposit schemes to ensure compliance with new regulation, sample pages, and is delivered in a format that your computer can process.

Most tenancy agreements will cost between £5 and £25 and come complete with a licence for unlimited personal use. The main difference between agreements bought online, to forms purchased in your local shop is the date that the document was produced. Online tenancy forms are easily updated year after year in line with relevant changes to the housing and tenant act, where as a mass produced tenancy will remain he same as its original publication due to the nature of print.