Specialist House Share, Rooms To Rent & H.M.O. Consultancy
Nationwide rooms to rent (house share) agency to help take the pressure out of finding a room to rent or a lodger. H.M.O. licensing consultancy and hands on management for professional house shares and H.M.O. property.
How to find the perfect lodger
How to find a lodger
It is quite easy to find a lodger. Really define the type of person you are looking for and then you can do a number of things. You can call Limecastle on 0800 458 3979 if you are in Shropshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire or West Midlands - as we are a fully experienced agency that only deals in lodging and house shares- or you can go it alone and start promoting your room!
Or you can post adverts up in local stores, ask people you know or even put a sign in your window or a lawn sign from Vistaprint
How can you be sure to get the right lodger?
First of all you need to decide why you are doing this. If this is a social thing, getting a lodger in, then you need to think about the type of social like you are expecting from this. Using either Limecastle or the websites above, you can pick a profile of a type of lodger you want, and they only get results from people you choose. You may want to be a party animal, and if you found someone really quiet and meek and mild, this would possibly not work for you.
If this is not a social thing, and you are not fussed on their party habits, you may be more interested in their hygiene standards or morals etc. Different people have different standards of hygiene, and one person's dirty is another person's tidy - hard to imagine I know.
Best to steer clear of sexual attraction - if it does not work out, you could end up living with someone you feel uncomfortable around. Better to invite them out for a date instead!!
From The Times October 27, 2006
Celia Brayfield explains how to find the perfect person to rent your spare room
HOW would you like an extra £4,250 a year, tax-free, plus an in-house masseuse, hair stylist and cat-sitter at no extra charge? Bit of a no-brainer, really, isn't it? And, for a blissful six months of this year, this dream was my reality - because I had a lodger.
After nearly ten years of renting my spare room, I reached Nirvana when the fabulous Tabs arrived to occupy my loft conversion for what, on balance, was to be a ridiculously excessive sum. We knew we were made for each other when she ventured into the kitchen to hang her string of peppers next to mine and add her retro blue enamel ladle to my brocante-sourced blue enamel utensil rack.
Within days I had become one of the coursework projects for her massage certificate, a commitment that forced me to accept a two-hour free massage every week. Then I discovered that she had already graduated from the poshest branch of a well-known hairdressing chain.
Tabs was on a mission. She wanted to move to the country and worked around the clock to fatten up her bank account, buy a car and fund a major career change, which meant that on most days she came home only to sleep and barely had time to use the washing machine. And she loved my cats.
Something else that helped our relationship was that we were at complementary stages in life: I was an empty-nester and Tabs is almost the same age as my daughter, who had just flown off to a house-share a few streets away. Tabs's parents had been working abroad for some years, and she admitted that she liked having somebody with whom to debate such issues as: "Am I crazy to think about a boyfriend who lives 200 miles away, is five years younger than me and plays professional rugby?" Traditionally, lodgers have a lousy image. In 1926 a young film director called Alfred Hitchcock made his name with The Lodger, a lowbudget creepie which implied that anyone who rented a room was probably Jack the Ripper. Since then the word has had something of the noir about it.
Things have changed since the Government launched its Rent-a-Room scheme, which gives tax relief to families who take lodgers. Now that stamp-duty increases have made moving house rather more expensive, more and more empty-nesters are choosing to stay put rather than downsize when their children leave home, not least because the tough, debt-ridden and uncertain life that awaits under-30s means that the chances of the fledgelings fluttering back in a couple of years are quite high.
The big psychological step of sharing your personal space with a stranger doesn't look so big once your life has been invaded by babies, au-pairs and nannies. After all, most lodgers speak some English, and won't be waking up at 3am to vomit over your pillow on a regular basis. The other life-stage at which taking lodger looks like a really good idea is the breathless moment when you buy or rent your first home and realise that all those incidental expenses that you fudged in your budget leave you with about 50p a week to spend on fun.
So how do you attract a lodger of the calibre of Tabs? First, get the room right. Clean, obviously, stylish and private, with as much in the way of dedicated facilities as you can offer. A double bed and a TV are pretty much expected. Hypoallergenic pillows and duvet are sensible. An en suite shower room or a mini-kitchen for your lodger's sole use makes life so much more civilised for both of you.
Find your lodger by word of mouth if you can. If you can't, try nearby institutions that may keep registers of accommodation providers - colleges or schools, hospitals or large companies often do this. A lodger who comes with this kind of structure is a better bet than a random stranger recruited on the internet.
Ask for references and take them up; amazingly, a survey by Zurich Insurance last year found that about 65 per cent of landlords did not do this. You also need to know where your lodger works, with whom they bank and who their next of kin is. Ask for at least one month's rent in advance, or a deposit. The lodger relationship is not legally regulated, so you can be left in the lurch after a moonlight flit.
Now for the real nitty-gritty - picking the right person. To be brutally honest, the best lodgers are smart, sorted, self-motivated, hard-working, successful people with good social lives. Believe me, you will regret taking pity on anyone who has just left their spouse or lost their job, because the chances are that they will mope all over you for a couple of months and then move on.
And be firm with yourself. Trust your instinct if somebody doesn't seem quite right. Accept that some personal differences can rarely be resolved, notably those related to pets, smoking, washing-up left in the sink and inability to work the burglar alarm. With every other irritation, speak up, sweetly but firmly, sooner and avoid bad feeling later.
