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The rise of the text sick note, and the email rent avoidance excuse.

By Hapless Investor

So we ,with our burgeoning property portfolio, were now living abroad and trying to manage the houses from a distance of 8000 miles. Email is a wonderful tool, from anywhere in the world including half way up Mt Fuji (trust us we tried) you can communicate with others at the touch of a button. Very similar in fact to using a phone but one step removed. It's no wonder that 1 in 8 of us now text our boss to say we're taking a sick day. There's no awkward moment where you summon up an Oscar worthy rendition of a person on their deathbed to justify your sprained ankle. And likewise when your friends the tenants email to say that the boiler needs repairing and then the washing machine needs repairing, no - actually replacing, and then they both loose their jobs and could they not pay for a while?

Now these are people I've been friends with for years and I wouldn't suggest even for a second that any of these things were untrue or even embellished, but when you have no means of checking and everything comes down to trust and your bank balance is dwindling you often find yourself, shall we say ‘questioning' why these things have happened.

Dealing with the various pros and cons of whether you're better by going through a management agency or not led us to investigate how the Japanese rental market worked.

The interest rate in Japan was virtually zero, even on loans, and as we were on decent money in a city we loved, the idea was certainly toying with our minds.

In Japan pretty much everything is done through a management company. You typically have a minimum of a two year lease, and you are usually required to jump through a number of financial hoops to prove that you are a suitable tenant (as a landlord I can't say that I have a problem with that).

Tenants pay a reservation fee (usually about one month's rent) before they sign their contracts to ensure you don't rent the apartment to anyone else. This is refundable on the signing of the contract which is useful as the tenant then needs to pay the deposit in a similar way to the UK but usually higher, often the equivalent of several month's rent. But then comes the good bit. Key money is the equivalent of several month's rent paid directly to the landlord as a gift from the tenant to the landlord for letting the tenant have the flat instead of the no doubt numerous alternative prospective tenants, and then the tenant also gives a monetary gift to the management company to thank them for all their hard work as well.

When your contract is up a month's rent can be charged as an admin fee for renewing a lease, and if the tenant chooses not to renew a lease a month's rent can be charged as an admin fee. 

All sounded a bit too good to be true as I received another drip of money from Manchester far less than I had been expecting.

Transcontinental telephone calls to the management agency resulted in no joy, and for the most part no response. It was time to call in the big guns.

My sister is a tax inspector and more to the point she is mother to a toddler. She takes no prisoners, whether it comes to potty training or management companies. Yet even the considerable might of my sister constantly on the phone, bombarding them with letters and even going up in person didn't seem to make any real progress. Eventually they produced invoices for an entire Yellow Pages' worth of work carried out at the house from replacing the fridge freezer to replacing locks. Apparently in the few short months a revolving door should have been put on our house. Tenants were moving in and out fairly regularly and the management company's policy was to replace all locks whenever someone left meaning that any actual rent we had got from them was pretty much going directly to the locksmiths!

So much for gifts from our tenants.

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