How Labour’s warfare on landlords is lastly driving me out

She seemed like the perfect tenant: a lady in her 50s, very polite and well-spoken, who had paid me a deposit and her first month’s rent up front.

A few weeks after she moved into my house, in a small town in Somerset, I paid her a visit. I like to have a friendly relationship with my tenants, so I always drop by once they have settled in to make sure everything is OK.

She was expecting me to call and greeted me with a smile.

The house had been let unfurnished and I was puzzled as I walked in as I could see the two reception rooms had beds in – and no other furniture.

In the kitchen were two pneumatic-looking eastern European girls who were in their mid-20s. I thought it was odd that they would be friends with someone much older, but I just assumed that they had met somewhere and the girls had stopped by for a cup of tea.

The truth dawned when I went upstairs, where there were more beds, piles of towels and bowls of condoms. I actually had a laugh about it once I’d got over the shock.

I’ve always been strict about not wanting anyone to smoke in my properties, but I guess there was nothing in the tenancy agreement about not using the house as a brothel.

Luckily for me, this was about 15 years ago, when you did not have to give a reason for evicting someone. I simply told this woman, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I need the house back’, and she agreed to leave.

If only it had always been that easy.

Over the 20 years or so that I’ve been renting out properties – five houses and two flats – I have had some excellent tenants. But I’ve had plenty of the others, too, some of whom have trashed my houses beyond recognition.

Aside from the brothel, I’ve also, inadvertently, run a drug den, a stolen property ring and a guinea pig farm. And this is all in a little market town. Heaven knows what it must be like in a big city.

Now the Government, insinuating that we small landlords are all greedy slum owners, wants to ban no-fault evictions.

The new Renters’ Rights Bill, which aims to give tenants greater protection, has just had its first reading in parliament. It all sounds very nice and I’m 100 per cent in favour of tenants’ rights – for decent tenants. But I predict this will be a disaster.

Over the past few years, costs and regulations have been piling up on landlords and this feels like the final straw. I’m selling up and I’m not the only one. With a rise in capital gains tax also looming in the October 30 Budget, one in four landlords is said to be throwing in the towel this year.

I have tried to be the best landlord I can, but I’ve had enough. Believe me, however plausible or respectable people appear when you first meet them, you can never tell who will turn out to be an oddity.

Like the lovely (or so I thought) recent tenant who couldn’t be bothered to use the bathroom, preferring to urinate in bottles, which he left behind in his bedroom when he moved out. Or the very nice-seeming woman who was the next tenant of the house which had been used as a brothel.

My mother-in-law used to help me give my properties a thorough clean before a new tenant moved in. On this particular day, we had arrived and changed out of our good clothes to do the cleaning. She was wearing a pair of expensive black patent Bally pumps with a bow on the front (costing around £120 then – a similar style retails for more than £500 now).

As we were finishing, the new tenant – another very respectable-looking lady in her 50s who I’ll call Sue – arrived. I said, ‘We’re finished cleaning, we’re just going to get a cup of coffee in town and then we’ll come back and pick up our stuff. Then the house is yours.’

So, we walked up the road to a cafe in our rough clothes and, as we were walking back, Sue was coming towards us. My mother-in-law said, ‘Oh, look, what a coincidence, she’s got the same shoes as me’, and, of course, when we got back to the house, her shoes weren’t there.

When Sue returned, my mother-in-law challenged her but she swore blind the shoes were hers. What can you do in a situation like that? It was one person’s word against another.

And this is what no government – neither Tory nor Labour – understands: that yes, there is a decent group of people who rent for whatever reason and pay their rent and behave well, but underneath that layer is something else entirely.

Some tenants simply stop paying rent or give false references. They lie and lie and lie. Others are just plain weird. You can serve them two months’ notice – the current legal requirement – and normal people would be thinking, ‘Oh God I’ve got to go’, but lots of people don’t. You have to take them to court and that costs an awful lot of money and since the pandemic (and Covid seems to be an excuse for everything) cases are stacking up. I wouldn’t advise anyone to become a private landlord in the present legislative climate.

I might sound cynical, but I entered the rental market with nothing but good intentions.

I was a PE teacher and, as such, you often get to work with the more lively or disruptive kids who might not be too interested in school, but love sport. I always got on well with them. I then moved on to working with children in secure units – kids who had been taken away from their parents for one reason or another.

I was really shocked to discover that at 18, provision stopped and they were out on their own. I’ve got two kids who went to university. No way would they have been able to cope alone at that age without myself and my husband to give them support.

I was about 40 at the time – I’ve just turned 60 – and I discussed with my husband buying a property that we could do up as five bedsits, with a shared living space, and have young people live in it. It was probably stupidly naive, but to start with, it worked brilliantly.

I loved it. I had a balance of decent kids who had a good influence on the ones from not so good backgrounds. I used to go round and collect the rent weekly and sometimes I’d clean up a bit, but it all worked well. I thought, ‘This is great, I’m getting a bit of money and, at the same time, I’m providing a decent place.’ It seemed like a win-win situation.

And, having established that we knew what we were doing, we started buying up other properties and renting them out as a business, first the houses – one of which I’ve just sold – then two one-bedroomed flats.

Those flats are a good example of how hard it is to tell the good from the odd. I rented both to men whose marriages had broken down. One was a model tenant.

The other wanted to pay his rent in cash, which is quite unusual now but was ok by me. So I went round every month to collect it. After a while, he started coming to the

door in full make-up and little hotpants. No problem, none of my business. Then he said he would be away on a trip and would leave the rent for me to pick up – from his bedside cabinet.

When I went into the flat, there were women’s clothes everywhere and the rent money had been left right beside two vibrators and a great big dildo. Obviously, they were left there deliberately and I was meant to see them: stuff like that you shouldn’t have to deal with.

Another chap always paid the rent on time and his room was always tidy. But when my mother-in-law and I went to clean for a new tenant, we found an empty bottle of methadone – then about 100 others, all stuffed under and around his mattress. So, a drug addict.

The worst clear-up I’ve ever had to do was at a house I rented to a couple with young children. They kept making excuses as to why I couldn’t check on the property.

Then, when I finally got in, I found they were breeding guinea pigs. There were cages all around the house, in the utility room and in the shed. The house stank to high heaven. They had had asked if they could have a dog and, as a dog lover, I said ‘yes, as long as the carpets are all clean when you leave.’ They had not one dog, but five.

It took me three years from start to finish to get them out and the mess they left – as well as owing me the best part of £2,000 in rent – was horrendous. I foolishly went round there with my daughter’s dog and my 96-year-old mother. The dog got infested with fleas, I got covered in flea bites, there was dogs’ mess in the utility room and in the bathroom. A man in a white hazmat suit had to throw flea bombs into the house before we could go in there again. It was so stressful and cost a fortune to put things right.

I must sound like an idiot when I tell some of these stories. But over a long period of time, when you have a run of good tenants – some of whom become friends – you forget about the bad ones.

And some of them… well, you have to laugh. Like young Steve, who wanted to pay his rent in stolen koi carp. I probably should never have rented a room to him. I knew he came from a troubled family but he had a job in a local supermarket, was always very polite and I felt a bit sorry for him. It turned out he was a heroin addict.

I got a call from the police and, when I arrived at the house, there was crime scene tape over the door and police vans outside. I got in to find Steve being restrained, with his arms up behind him, on my sofa. He just about managed to turn his head and say, ‘All right Vanessa!’.

The police arrested him. But two or three days later, he was back in the property. I tried and tried to evict him. What I didn’t realise was that, although I kept checking the house, the shed was full of stolen bikes. Apparently, he was also a prolific bike thief.

When I went into the garden, there was one of those pond inserts which would normally be dug into the ground and he had stolen all these koi carp – worth up to £100 each – and they were there swimming around. He had lost his job so he couldn’t pay the rent and said, ‘I’ll tell you what, you take the carp.’

I do wonder where people like Steve – and many others – will live as the number of properties available to rent shrinks. We already have a housing crisis, which can only get worse as landlords bail out. Luckily, it’s not my problem.

And Steve did leave me with a nice thought. The day I finally managed to get him out, he was standing outside with all his stuff, waiting for someone to pick him up. After everything that had happened – the drugs raid, the stolen bikes, the eviction – he held out his hand and said, ‘Here’s a pot plant for you Vanessa. Best landlady I’ve ever had.’