Selling your rental to make room for new opportunities? It happens all the time.

But when you’ve got tenants living in there right now? The sale won’t be quite so simple as whacking your property on Rightmove and seeing what happens.

The good news is that you can keep complications to a minimum throughout the process, and make sure that everyone gets what they want at the same time. All that’s required is a bit of careful thinking. Here’s the short version of how you should play your sale:

• Maintain a great relationship with your tenant throughout the sale – no matter who you’re selling to
• Decide whether to target homeowners or just landlords
• Serve tenants a Section 21 before listing your property, if selling to homeowners
• Give tenants 24 hours’ notice in writing before every viewing
• Consider reducing the rent for the final two months
• Return all the deposit owed when your tenant leaves the property

Now keep reading to understand exactly what needs to happen to make your sale legal, happy and profitable.

Who are you selling to? You decide.

Are you aiming to sell the property to another landlord or to a homeowner?

In terms of what happens to your tenants, this is the most important decision to make at the outset. Because if you’re targeting homeowners, your tenants are going to need to vacate the property by the time the sale’s complete – obviously.

So decide straight away whether you’ll be targeting just landlords – or homeowners too – and make your next moves based on that choice.

Why sell to landlords only?

While you’ll reduce your pool of potential buyers by cutting homeowners out of the picture, there are plenty of benefits to selling to landlords only.

If you’ve set up your tenants under a fixed tenancy contract, you’re perfectly within your rights to sell your property and let the tenants stay where they are.

Perfect for the tenants if they don’t want to move…

Perfect for the buyer as they’ll already have a guaranteed source of income…

And perfect for you because it makes your property more attractive.

From the tenant’s point of view, nothing would change and all that would happen is that the tenancy agreement would be transferred to the new landlord. Same terms, same tenancy; everyone’s happy.

And there’s more good news for you too. Since your tenants won’t be moving, you’ll continue to receive their rent right up until completion day.

But if you’ve been trying to sell to landlords for a while and the property just won’t shift, you might want to consider widening your pool and targeting homeowners too. So what changes when you do that?

Selling to everybody – don’t forget your Section 21

If you decide to widen your market and target landlords and homeowners, you’ll need to serve a Section 21 notice before you can put your property back on the market and move forward with selling your rental.

A Section 21 is a 60-day notice which means you can state that the house will be empty at the completion of the sale in all your marketing collateral.

How to organise viewings

Next come the viewings. The terms of your contract will affect the way you go about organising viewings.

If your tenancy agreement states that tenants must reasonably accommodate viewings then it should be easy to organise them. All you’ll need to do is give your tenant 24 hours’ notice in writing.

But if there’s no mention of viewings in your tenancy agreement? You’ll need to get the express permission of your tenants before you can arrange any viewings.

It’s rare that you’d have a problem here – especially if you’ve been on good terms with your tenant from the get-go. Just keep communication open and be prepared to work towards a compromise (like agreeing that you’ll only ever arrange viewings for Tuesdays and Thursdays, for example).

If your tenant’s not playing ball, try offering to lower the rent or provide another incentive to thank them for putting up with the inconvenience.

Keep it positive!

As frustrating as it is when a tenant kicks up a fuss, it’s not worth you getting cross or speaking out of line. Stay calm, be polite and do what you can to keep things moving.

The better your relationship is with your tenants, the less likely it is that you’ll experience unwelcome complications when it comes to selling your rental. If you’re selling to someone who isn’t a landlord, they’ll want confirmation that the property’s completely vacant before exchanging and completing.

That’s because the law says that whoever owns the property is responsible for its tenants. What’s more, a new buyer isn’t allowed to just cancel a tenancy agreement and has no right to evict them. So it’s up to you to maintain a good relationship with the tenants throughout the sale and ensure that they’re moved out before completion.

Remember to return all of the deposit that’s owed in the last few days of the tenancy and you can finally wind everything down on good terms.

Then all that’s left to do is pop open a bottle of bubbly and start getting excited for the next opportunity!

If you’d like help getting the most out of selling your rental, and managing relationships with your tenants throughout the process, we’re here for you. Give us a call at the Hello Owl office on 020 3432 3888.