The accidental landlord:grubby, untidy students are perfect tenants

They smoke indoors, never clean the loo and you might have to use a cattle prod to extract the rent. But they pay eventually.

£560 a week: a two-double bedroom flat in a converted telecoms building near Old Spitalfields Market, E1, with large contemporary-style reception/living room, period windows and 24-hour concierge. Through Dexters (020 7392 9111).

A mum and her 19-year-old daughter turn up to view a spare room in my student flat. At the end of the tour, the mother looks like she is going to burst into tears. “Is everything okay?” I ask. She shrugs and says: “This is probably the best she can hope for in London,” which is not exactly what I wanted to hear, but her daughter laughs. “It’s fine Mum, really, I’ll take it,” she says, grinning.

This is why I let to students. They don’t care where they live as long as it’s cheap and has superfast wi-fi. As long as they have a double bed and a desk, they’re happy. Do they keep the property clean? Nope. Do they pay their rent on time, every month and without prompting? Not a hope. Do they leave rooms as they found them? Never. So are they good tenants? Definitely.

I say this even though I’m grossed out by the state of my student flat. There’s always a greasy frying pan floating in the sink and dirty coffee cups lying around the kitchen. No one cleans the bathroom, ever. And it has never occurred to any of them to use the vacuum cleaner.

They all ignore the “no smoking inside” rule yet never empty the ashtrays. They frequently clog the sink with soap and hair. They’ve broken the oven, the washing machine and the fridge-freezer.

Two students have just moved out and though they said they’d cleaned their rooms, I fished out pants, odd socks, a pile of balled-up sticky pink notes and dozens of hairgrips and sticky old make-up bottles from under the beds, then had to spray one room repeatedly with Febreze to get rid of the stink of cigarettes.

They’d both left Blu Tack all over the walls and one had ripped a bit off the paper where she’d removed her Harry Styles poster and hundreds of photos, mainly of herself. But still, I’ve come to love my student tenants. I don’t care if they want to live in squalor, as I don’t have to share with them. And it doesn’t matter if they leave a mess because the next lot of students won’t even notice.

Many landlords worry that jobless, feckless students won’t pay the rent but as long as you take a deposit and insist on their parents acting as guarantors, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Sure, you might need to make the odd call to remind them to cough up — they often think that if you don’t ask, they don’t have to pay — and you might need to wait a few weeks at the start of term for their student loans to come through, but I’ve never had one who didn’t pay, albeit after a bit of prodding.

I think it’s a great market and it seems to be growing because many universities don’t have enough accommodation, even for their first-year students.

My daughter received an email from the university she’ll be attending next week — eeeek! — warning her that she might have to bunk in with another girl because of a shortage of rooms in their halls. When she told a friend who was at the same uni a few years ago, the friend said my daughter was lucky — she’d just been given a bed roll and told to sleep in the sports hall.

My new young tenant tells me she’s grateful to have found a room, any room, close to her college. Now all we have to do is reassure her mum.

http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/renting/grubby-untidy-students-are-perfect-tenants-a113716.html