Search results

Hong Kong has developed one of the world’s largest initiatives of user participation in public service in the public rental housing sector. This paper analyses the development and the impact of such an initiative in tenant participation. Whilst the housing managers and tenant representatives were by and large receptive of such an initiative, tenants were in general more apathetic. Involving tenants in public housing management can also be perceived as a strategy of the landlord in bridging the gap between expensive paternalistic management and the legitimate expectation of the tenants. It can also be viewed as a measure to mitigate the internal conflicts within the Housing Department as a tool to enhance the effectiveness of the management service. Yet, recent development in the public housing sector in Hong Kong may bring fundamental changes in both the provision and management of public housing. This creates uncertainty regarding the further development of tenant participation.

Discusses the often misunderstood area of building operating cost escalations – that is, the share of building operating expenses charged to an office tenant – with the goal of offering a greater practical understanding of key concepts and calculation methods. Defines and explains the base year, expense stop, stipulated base amount, and office triple net methods of calculation, including the gross‐up concept for base year leases. Using sample numbers, compares the tenant′s cost obligation under each method. Offers practical pointers to enhance the facility manager′s ability to evaluate and deal with escalations. Advocates inclusion of detailed audit rights in the lease document to permit the tenant to audit annual escalations and provides sample audit right language.

This legal update examines recent decisions on the security of tenure given by Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 to business tenants, and asks whether it is time to revisit or remove a piece of legislation that was drafted to deal with the consequences of war damage and short supply of commercial premises during the 1950s. It highlights the narrow, technical rules and distinctions that make little sense to commercial parties. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper considers recent court rulings in the light of the original purpose of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, focusing on provisions that were reformed in 1969-reflect changes in market conditions since the immediate post-Second World War period.

Narrow, technical rules and exceptions carry considerable risks for commercial landlords and may not be appropriate or necessary in current market conditions.

The paper examines only a recent selection of court rulings, but highlights the potentially harsh impact on commercial landlords of legislation designed to protect tenant interests in market conditions radically different from those prevailing some 60 years after its enactment.

With no immediate prospect of reform, the paper highlights the need for landlords to adhere closely to the precise technical requirements of the Act.

The paper is based on the author’s reading and analysis of recent Court of Appeal rulings.

Difficult economic and trading conditions make lease break options a point of significant legal tension between commercial landlords and tenants. For a tenant, the ability to break a lease provides a means of controlling costs and an exit from liabilities. For landlords, the loss of a tenant's covenant means an immediate adverse effect on the reversionary value of the property. The purpose of this paper is to examine recent English court rulings to highlight the need for strict compliance with break conditions if a tenant is to succeed in ending its liabilities.

The paper discusses recent rulings to assess the extent to which judicial interpretation of break clauses continues to favour landlords, and whether landlords' conduct in negotiations or correspondence leading up to the exercise of a tenant's break option might engage concepts such as estoppel to bind the landlord to a particular level of compliance or breach.

The paper concludes that the English court continues to apply a strict approach to compliance with break conditions, and that it remains the tenant's responsibility both to determine what needs to be done by way of compliance and to ensure that those steps are taken.

The authors place the most recent rulings on the perennially vexed issue of compliance with break conditions into a broader context, demonstrating that the judicial approach remains firmly based on the principle that a break option is negotiated for the tenant's benefit, and that any conditions precedent to exercise are highly likely to be construed against the tenant who agreed to a break conditional on anything other than service of notice.

In February 1984 Mr Ian Gow, the then Minister of Housing and Construction, established a Committee of Inquiry on the management of privately owned blocks of flats, under the chairmanship of the distinguished barrister Edward Nugee QC. The committee's report was published in the summer of 1985 and many of its recommendations are now set to become law. The proposed legislative changes will have major implications for both landlords and tenants of blocks of flats. The Nugee Report was the culmination of a series of papers in the past few years reflecting an increasing concern over the state of many blocks of flats. Recent publications on the subject include the James Report, produced by a working party established by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and a paper emanating from the Building Societies Association entitled ‘Leasehold — Time for Change’ which urged the adoption of a system of strata title for properties in multiple occupation. No one should underestimate the difficulties which the Committee of Inquiry faced. ‘Bad flat management’ covers a multitude of different situations which can be viewed from numerous different perspectives. Disputes are not just confined to those between landlord and tenant. There are conflicts between the tenants themselves, particularly in older blocks built to be rented but broken up by the grant of long leases. Add to this the further complication that many blocks are now run by managing agents who may themselves be involved in battles with either the landlord or his tenants, and it will rapidly become clear that there were no simple solutions to be found. Each recommendation had to take account of all the potential problems and not simply tackle one at the expense of exacerbating another.

In formulating his theory of land rent, Ricardo did not take into account the fact that in the Europe of his time relationships between landlords and tenants were often regulated by customs that kept rents below marginal product, sometimes even in the long term. Since all those customs had a number of points in common, understanding the logic governing one of them can be a very useful way to gain an overall understanding of the phenomenon. This chapter analyses a case of such customs in the area of market-gardens surrounding the city of Valencia, eastern Spain. Here, tenants were by custom the owners of the improvements they carried out, agricultural efficiency increased, and land rents stagnated. The chapter addresses issues such as cooperation among large groups of people, definition of rights and the creation of property rights by means of social conventions that clashed with law.

In many countries in the Global North, interventions in deprived neighbourhoods have attempted to tackle poverty by spatially deconcentrating it. This has commonly been done through housing restructuring programmes in areas of social housing. Supported by the ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis, such interventions promote the diversification of housing tenures and housing typologies, based on the idea that a wider mix will result in increased opportunities of interaction across housing tenures and in local social networks becoming more heterogeneous. Using data from interviews, surveys and participant observation in meetings and events organised by local residents in North Peckham, an area in South London which in the 1990s and beginning of 2000s was the site of a large-scale housing restructuring programme, this chapter explores the expectations and experiences of neighbouring of long-term and newer arrival social housing tenants. This chapter shows that their different experiences of the neighbourhood and of physical and social change, as well as their diverging socio-economic characteristics – long-term residents tended to be older and retired while newer residents tended to have more complex needs – highly influenced perceptions of neighbourly relations and the significance attached to them. Despite finding high levels of neighbourly interaction and assistance, it also shows that attitudes and expectations towards neighbours were marked by a sense of nostalgia among long-term social tenants, stigma due to the area’s past and towards newer social tenants and by feelings of alienation due to the perceived residualisation of the social housing tenure and increased housing unaffordability.

This paper aims to examine landlords’ health support systems to tenants to control COVID-19 in selected informal settlement rental housing (ISRH) in Ghana, dwelling on landlords’ views.

The paper used the concurrent imbedded mixed-methods approach and grounded the findings in the socio-ecological theory. The authors collected both qualitative and quantitative data from 242 landlords in 13 informal settlements across Ghana using quotas. The authors undertook semi-structured face-to-face and telephone interviews. The authors conducted content and thematic qualitative data analysis and used simple descriptive statistical data analysis.

The paper discovered that tenants had limited knowledge on the transmission of the pandemic, forcing landlords to regulate their building services usage, ventilation and thermal control, entertainment, common areas and rent advancement for tenants to control the pandemic. Also, tenants found it difficult to comply with the rules on ventilation for fear of criminal attacks, while high social connection and interaction among renters and inadequate enforcement caused the non-adherence by renters to social gathering. Again, landlords had difficulty in contract-tracing visitors suspected to be infected with the virus.

The use of concurrent and imbedded mixed methods to investigate landlords’ viewpoints on their support in health needs of their tenants to regulate COVID-19. The prescriptions from the study provide practical applications to formulate a mix of housing and health policies to formalize the support of landlords to their tenants in ISRH in Ghana.

Trade centers are operationally run by a property manager as a delegate of the property owner. The dimensions of service quality (SERVQUAL), which include tangibles, assurance, empathy, reliability and responsiveness, are vital to be implemented as the duties of property managers when providing service to tenants to maintain tenant satisfaction and property reputation. This study aims to understand the effects of the SERVQUAL dimensions, the role of property management and the quality of rental value on tenant satisfaction and property reputation.

The sample was gathered using the purposive sampling technique with the criteria of being a tenant and kiosk owner in trade center properties in Surabaya. Data were gathered using questionnaires, from which 100 respondents were acquired. It was then analyzed using the partial least square structural equation model (SEM) in the SmartPLS 3.0 program to test the hypothesis.

The results of this study prove that the SERVQUAL dimensions – assurance, empathy and responsiveness – significantly influence tenant satisfaction with the mediating variable of the role of property management. Moreover, the SERVQUAL dimensions – empathy, reliability and responsiveness – significantly influence property reputation with the mediating variable of the role of property management.

Property managers are expected to proactively map out different service measures related to the dimension of satisfaction by conducting service training programs for their employees. In fact, in the post-pandemic period, property managers require new marketing strategies, such as leaseback, to effectively carry out renovations of the trade center’s public facilities and restructure the tenant mix.

Trade centers as trading areas experience management limitations because of the prohibition of mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a limited number of onsite trading. Tenants who have entered into a long-term contract experience loss and rely on the aid of property management to survive. The role and quality of service of property management influence tenants’ satisfaction post-COVID-19 pandemic.

The Recast Energy Efficiency Directive 2023 has defined the concept of “split incentive,” also known as “tenant-owner dilemma.” This dilemma refers to the situation where neither landlords nor tenants have incentives to invest in energy efficiency upgrades. Although the Energy Efficiency Directive calls Member States to overcome legal barriers to remove split incentives and to encourage retrofits, the list of possible measures is too vague. This paper aims to discuss tenancy law measures designed to increase the energy efficiency of residential housing and to detect which Member States have already addressed this phenomenon.

This paper analyses, from a civil legal perspective, the possible private law barriers arising from the tenant-owner dilemma when performing energy efficiency works in selected countries and proposes legal reforms in tenancy law and related policies to overcome them. To do so, this paper follows a legal-dogmatic and comparative law methodology.

This paper concludes that some tenancy law provisions, such as the possibility to increase the rent after energy efficiency renovations and long-term leases, may challenge the tenant-owner dilemma in private rented markets, thus promoting renovations and retrofitting for energy efficiency purposes. It also proposes other policies intended to increase parties’ willingness to undertake works.

More research on the economic and legal efficiency to regulate some of the civil law measures to challenge the tenant-owner dilemma should be necessary.

The civil law measures included in this paper may help national policymakers meet the energy efficiency targets, according to what is established in the Recast Energy Efficiency Directive 2023.

Based on the economic theory of the tenant-owner dilemma, this paper investigates the elements of tenancy law that may contribute to less energy-efficient homes, proposing policies for those countries interested in addressing the energy-efficiency challenge from a private law point of view.