I recently received a “Help Dad!” WhatsApp message from my daughter who is renting a flat with a friend.
She enclosed 2 photos which I’ll show you in the video, of damp on the internal surface of the main external wall.
This is a ground floor flat, so it could be rising damp.
But my initial view is that it’s more likely to be condensation.
So I asked her, “How often do you ventilate the flat, like open windows?”
Her answer? “Hardly ever”.
Having been on the other side of this with my tenants, and it drives me mad.
It particularly infuriates my managing agent, who’ll get a phone call accusing him of renting the tenant a damp property when he knows they took it in pristine condition.
Now, with years of experience, he knows what he’s most likely to find when he gets there. The tenants never open the windows, but they are cooking, bathing and showering, and breathing, and the thing which really gets him cross, drying clothes on the radiators. But they never open a window.
The damp is condensation, pure and simple.
So, he explains to the tenants that they need to open windows when cooking and showering.
Of course, nowadays we’re installing electric fans into bathrooms. And he tells them they should never be drying all their washing on the radiators. Hopefully, that resolves the problem, although some tenants ignore him but keep complaining.
One thing he has started doing is explaining to new tenants how and when to ventilate a property.
Hopefully that will help.
Here’s to Successful Property Investing.
Peter
Peter Jones
(ex) Chartered Surveyor, author and property investor
http://www.PropertyRenovationProfits.co.uk
PS. By the way, I’ve rewritten and updated my best-selling e-book, The Successful Property Renovator’s Workshop, will show you how to organise and undertake your renovations and guarantee yourself a profit every time – based on the more than 100 property renovations I have undertaken over the last 25 years.
For more details please go to:
And, of course, there’s also 63 Common Defects in Investment Property and How to Spot Them, in which I’ll show what to look for when buying a property, and how I inspect my properties to give myself the best possible chance of understanding the structure and any repairs and improvements.
63 Common Defects In Investment Property And How To Spot Them
