Within the UK, the share of households occupied by personal renters has nearly doubled in 20 years. While 76% of tenants at present personal or aspire to personal a pet, with 1 in 3 saying their pets assist their psychological wellbeing, final 12 months simply 7% of personal landlords listed their properties as permitting animals. This highlights the rented sector’s stark failure to fulfill the rising demand amongst tenants for pet-friendly lodging.
The findings of the Battersea survey, which polled a nationally consultant pattern of two,000 UK adults, are a part of the charity’s ongoing Pet Pleasant Properties marketing campaign and are available after the Authorities unveiled a sequence of recent pet-friendly insurance policies in its long-awaited White Paper, ‘A fairer rented sector’, final month.
The proposed measures embody formally granting tenants the best to request having an animal of their property, while requiring landlords to offer a justifiable cause for refusing a pet. With 1 in 4 individuals figuring out a scarcity of pet-friendly properties as one of many greatest housing points within the UK, Battersea’s findings verify the size of the problem for the booming business.
Peter Laurie, Battersea’s Chief Government, mentioned: “At Battersea, we soak up much-loved pets for a lot of causes – however one issue we see house owners cite time and time once more just isn’t with the ability to discover a rental property that enables animals. It’s heartbreaking to see house owners having to surrender their cherished pets for lack of housing choices.
“With long-term renting firmly on the rise, we’re calling on the Authorities to do extra to extend the variety of pet-friendly houses throughout the nation. Not solely will this assist guarantee extra canines and cats are in a position to keep of their unique, loving houses, it is going to additionally enable extra individuals to benefit from the many advantages of accountable pet possession.”
Luckily, there are already landlords who assist their tenants’ option to personal a pet. Dominic Payne de Cramilly, an Essex-based landlord with two canines and two cats of his personal, has had superb experiences with pet-owning tenants. A Nationwide Residential Landlords Affiliation (NRLA) member and landlord of 25 years, he believes the advantages of renting to pet house owners – like decrease tenant turnover and gaining a business edge over animal-averse opponents – have to this point gone comparatively unnoticed by landlords.
Dominic mentioned: “Offering the property is appropriate for the kind of pet a tenant owns, I’ve completely no concern renting to a pet proprietor. In the end, I discover animals are a product of their house owners – if the tenant is nicely behaved, chances are high their pet can be too. I’ve been a landlord for 1 / 4 of a century and have had way more points with people inflicting injury in my properties than I’ve ever had with pets. The concept of all pets being harmful is an enormous false impression, and there’s undoubtedly some myth-busting to be performed amongst the owner group.”
