Professional management for houses in multiple occupation — across London and throughout the UK. Licensing, room letting, compliance and the arrears nobody else chases.
Tell it about the property and it will tell you whether a licence is required, whether the smallest room is lawful, and what the rooms actually produce after voids and fees. It runs in your browser. Nothing reaches us unless you send it.
The property management consultancy team at Fraser Bond delivers a highly professional and tailored commercial property management service, focussed on responsible property management. Our clients include developers, investors and occupiers in the public and private sectors — served from each of our UK regional and London offices.
An HMO is not a flat with more tenants in it. Five or six separate agreements, five or six separate arrears positions, a licence with conditions attached to it, fire doors that have to be inspected rather than assumed, and a room that has to be let again the week someone leaves. Most of the cost of owning one is not the mortgage. It is the weeks a room sits empty, the arrears nobody chased until they were three months old, and the licence condition that turns into a penalty because no one was watching the diary.
Room letting and re-letting, rent collection and arrears, the licence and its conditions, statutory testing and certificates, repairs and contractors, and the tenancy paperwork for every room rather than for the house.
Applied for, conditions tracked, renewal in the diary before it lapses.
Explore →A room re-let is the single biggest lever on what an HMO earns.
Explore →Chased weekly per room, not monthly per house.
Explore →Gas, electrical, fire doors, alarms and emergency lighting, on a schedule.
Explore →Reported, instructed and signed off without you being the middleman.
Explore →If the HMOs sit alongside single lets, both can be run from one place.
Explore →HMO management is a different job from single-let management, and it goes wrong in different ways. We run them as licensed buildings with a letting operation attached — which means the compliance diary and the room availability list are the two things we look at first, every week.
GOV.UK states that a property is an HMO where at least three tenants live there forming more than one household and share a toilet, bathroom or kitchen, and that an HMO must have a licence if it is occupied by five or more people. Councils can also bring other types of HMO into licensing, so a property under five occupants is not automatically outside it — that depends on your council.
Under the mandatory licence conditions in SI 2018/616, a room slept in by one person aged over 10 must be not less than 6.51 square metres, by two people aged over 10 not less than 10.22 square metres, and by one child under 10 not less than 4.64 square metres. Any part of the room where the ceiling is below 1.5 metres is left out of the calculation, and a room under 4.64 square metres must not be used for sleeping at all and must be notified to the council.
Use class C4 covers HMOs of three to six unrelated occupants, and permission is required for any HMO occupied by seven or more unrelated people. Where a council has made an Article 4 direction it removes the permitted development right, so even a three to six person HMO needs permission. Whether you are in such an area depends on the borough, and in London many have one.
A council can issue a civil penalty of up to GBP 30,000, and the First-Tier Property Tribunal can make a rent repayment order covering up to twelve months of rent received during the unlicensed period, on the application of either the council or the tenants.
Yes. The licensing framework is national, and the parts that vary — additional licensing, selective licensing and Article 4 — vary by council whether that council is in London or not. Most of our HMO work is London, and we manage elsewhere in the UK as well.
We quote on the property rather than from a rate card, because the work in a six-room professional share and a twelve-room licensed HMO in an Article 4 area are not the same job. The tool on this page lets you model any fee percentage you like against your own rents, so you can see what a fee has to beat before you ever speak to us.
Use the check above for the licensing and the numbers. If you want it taken on, send it through and we will come back on the licensing position and what we would charge to run it.