Putting your money into bricks and mortar and developing your own property portfolio is the dream for many people. However, becoming a landlord is not always plain sailing.
Some landlords need to evict tenants, which requires legal steps to be followed meticulously.
One of the most important steps which needs to be completed is service of process. If you don’t execute a service of process correctly, there may be devastating consequences.
What is Service of Process?
Service of process is the term used to refer to serving papers to your tenant. It is a compulsory step in the battle to regaining the keys to your property. The papers that are served to the tenant will notify them that their landlord is taking them to court to win a possession order on the property. Note, papers cannot be served within the first four months of a tenancy agreement.
What this means is the landlord will then have the legal right to evict the tenant. The papers are most commonly hand delivered to the tenant, either at the property itself or at their workplace. In hand delivering them, the tenant cannot claim that they did not receive them.
Many people who serve papers choose to use witnesses or professional teams in case the tenant decides to claim they never received the notice. However, it is possible to serve papers by post – and even by email and social media in some cases.
What Happens if it is Not Executed Properly?
If a tenant has not paid rent for months and refuses to leave your property, you may be in dismay when the judge sides with the tenant. However, this is far from a small possibility. Although most landlords do win possession orders first time around, many judges have ruled in favour of tenants due to the service of notice procedure not being carried out properly.
The argument is that notice is not equal to knowledge. Just because you posted the Section 21 notice of eviction does not mean the tenant received it. You need to take extreme care with this step to ensure tenants cannot make genuine claims that they did not receive the notice – or false ones. If you cannot prove that they did receive the notice, then it may take a second trip to court, including more unpaid rent and more legal fees to get your property back.
The Benefits of Using Able Investigations
Instead of risking not obtaining a possession order, many people prefer to use an experienced and professional process serving team to carry out a service of process on your behalf. Able Investigations are at hand to do this for you and there are many benefits in choosing our service, including:
- We have ISO:90001 accreditation
- We serve papers within 24 hours
- We plan up to three visits – even off-peak visits
- Get access to our support team
- Extensive legal knowledge
- Fixed fee with no hidden charges
Discover more about our service of process procedure by getting in touch, give our experienced team a call on 0345 366 0000 or email us at [email protected]. Let’s make the next step to repossessing your property, together.
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