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06th December 2011

78% of Deposits Are Withheld Due To Cleaning Issues

Recent data from The Deposit Protection Service (DPS) has thrown up some interesting statistics in relation to deposit disputes.

According to their stats, 40% of disputes were a result of cleaning, 60% of deposit disputes resulted from actual damage to property, and 31% were due to redecoration over the period from June to August 2011.

Other statistics recently released by My Deposits showed that out of Landlords that did retain part of the deposit, 78% did so to pay for cleaning after the tenant had left. Damage to property, furniture and carpets were other key reasons why tenants didn’t receive all of their money back.

Historically, landlords have performed badly at adjudication, winning only 8% of cases outright. The stats indicate that landlords need to be much better prepared to be able to handle disputes involving damage and redecoration, to have any chance of winning in front of the adjudicators.

These stats could be improved hugely if landlords took a few simple precautions to ensure they have sufficient evidence as to the state of the property at the start of the tenancy and a record of the condition at the end so the differences are clearly discernible.

At The Video inventory Agency, we believe there is no better way of recording the state of your property than with a professionally written inventory supported by comprehensive high definition video evidence.  If landlords used a service like ours we could see them reversing the current stats and winning 92% of cases instead of losing 92%. In fact, with over 5000 inventories under our belt we have not had a single case go to adjudication, because as soon as the parties refer to the video evidence it decides the matter categorically there and then.