The online legal advice centre, Compact Law, reminds landlords that they have a legal responsibility for ensuring that their let property is fit to be lived in and that repairs are carried out whenever necessary.
Quite apart from your legal obligations as a landlord, however, you might also want to take notice of the fact that a landlord’s failure to attend to necessary repairs is a significant cause for dissatisfaction. A survey in 2017 by letting agents Home Let, for instance, found that as many as 25% of tenants are either “definitely not happy” or “not really happy” with their landlords’ responses to the need for repairs – and unhappy tenants are unlikely to make long-term, reliable or especially responsible tenants.
Landlord emergency assistance insurance
If the way you attend to routine repairs is at the heart of a good relationship with your tenants, imagine how much more that is likely to be the case with repairs that need to be carried out in an emergency.
When the tenant telephones you at 3 a.m. to tell you about the water that is gushing out of a burst pipe or a central heating boiler that has left them with no heating or hot water, what do you do? There are two possible scenarios:
- you throw on some clothes and get around there in the dead of night to try to make a holding repair yourself, before calling a plumber or boiler engineer at first light; or
- from the comfort of your own bed, you simply pick up the phone, dial the Landlords Home Emergency Protect 24-hour helpline and leave the rest to your landlord home emergency cover.
What it covers
Landlord insurance emergency assistance may be as simple as that. When you call the helpline, you are advised what the tenant needs to do to protect their own safety and to prevent further damage to your property.
Once you have outlined the nature of the emergency, a qualified engineer or tradesman is despatched to the let property as soon as possible to effect emergency repairs. If you and the tenant prefers, the appointment might also be arranged for a time that suits you both.
The cost of the call-out, the repairs and the labour in response to an emergency defined in your policy document is covered by your landlord emergency insurance – and there is not even any excess to pay.
Defined emergencies
In any landlord emergency cover comparison, we are confident of the value for money represented by our Landlords Home Emergency Protect policy.
For less than £80 a year up to £500 worth of emergency call-outs and repairs cover the cost of failures of your let property’s central heating system (for boilers up to 15 years old), failure of the electricity supply, major plumbing emergencies, damage to the roof of the let property, damage to any locks, windows or doors which leaves the property insecure, and the provision of alternative accommodation if your let property is temporarily uninhabitable pending emergency repairs.
For even greater peace of mind, you might also want to take advantage of our annual boiler servicing plan and the provision of the legally required CP12 annual gas safety certificate, following inspection by a Gas Safe registered engineer.
