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The RLA has been approved to run a new Rent Smart Wales training course for letting agents.
Under the Rent Smart Wales Scheme agents, individuals or companies which carry out lettings and management work at rental properties in Wales on behalf of landlords must become licensed.

After the referendum result, the RLA’s Landlord Advice Team has received a number of calls regarding the impact of Brexit on the PRS. Usually this is about how it affects the Right to Rent legislation.

The RLA has launched its quarterly survey on the state of the PRS – focusing on the areas of tax and finance. The short survey will take around 10 minutes to complete and includes questions on issues including the Government’s recent tax changes. The findings will help us provide an up-to-date understanding of the key […]

Rent hikes are inevitable unless MPs move to halt the Government’s unfair tax-grab targeting private landlords.
Government plans to tax landlords on their income rather than after allowances – part of the loss of mortgage interest relief – has brought a warning from the Residential Landlord’s Association that inevitable rent increases could make tenants the victims of the government’s tax changes.

RLA evidence on Stamp Duty, Mortgage Interest Relief and Capital Gains Tax has been officially submitted to Government.
The association’s submission to the Finance Bill committee has called for new build properties to be exempted from the new Stamp Duty levy. It is also calling for Mortgage Interest Relief to apply only to new borrowing and for Capital Gains Tax to be reduced to 20% where a landlord is selling a property to a sitting tenant.

The RLA’s new website will launch on Monday, July 11th.
The site, which will go live at around midday, will be accessible from any device, whether a desktop PC, laptop, tablet, phablet or smart phone, so no matter what you want to see, you can see it anywhere.

The Landlord Advice Team assists with all sorts of advice for landlords but the bulk of our queries fall into two categories; deposit protection and evictions.
For evictions, most of the time these are relatively simple to resolve as the fixed term is ending or coming to end so we advise a section 21 notice. However sometimes the tenant has only recently moved in but has already become a nightmare for the landlord.

One topic that comes up regularly for the Landlord Advice Team in the wake of the new section 21 notice is gas safety certificates.
One of the legal requirements on landlords is to have a valid gas safety certificate and to have provided that to the tenants. Failure to do so can lead to fines and, for tenancies that started on or after October 1st 2015, landlords are prevented from serving the new section 21 form without it.

An RLA recommendation – to reduce Capital Gains Tax (CGT) paid by landlords when selling their rented home to sitting tenants – is being proposed as an amendment to the Finance Bill

The people have spoken and Brexit is now a reality. But what does this mean for the PRS landlord? Here RLA policy and communications manger John Stewart looks at the potential impact of leaving the European Union on the residential landlord.
The UK has voted to leave the European Union. Where does that leave landlords and the private rented sector? In many ways, exactly where we were before the vote – surrounded by a huge cloud of uncertainty.
The leaders of the Leave campaign have been short on detail when it comes to what a post-Brexit UK would look like, beyond ‘taking back control’ and making Britain great again’. The Prime Minister will step down in October, adding a Conservative leadership election to mix.