Many tenants wish to have a beloved pet to live with them. In this blog we will go over the general guidelines to keeping pets.

Requesting Permission

First and foremost, its important to get permission from the Landlord to allow a pet to stay in rented accommodation. A tenant will need to review the tenancy agreement to see the correct process on how to request permission for a pet. Currently a landlord can refuse pets by default but they need to provide a good reason for it. There is upcoming changes to the law, that we wrote about in a previous blog post that may change this to require the process to be decided on an individual basis.

There is many reasons that a Landlord may refuse a pet, such as the proposed pet being too big for the property, potential for damage to a property, neighborhood disruption and concern for allergies in other tenants or the landlord.

Deposits & Insurance

A Landlord may accept a pet, but ask for some adjustments. Such as the tenant taking out Pet or Damage insurance to help safeguard the value of the property. These are normally decided on a case-by-case basis when the Landlord is considering your application to keep a Pet. A Landlord cannot increase the rent they charge to you for a pet, however they may request up to 2 months of Rent upfront as a deposit to help cover any short-term damage that a Pet may cause.

Keeping a Pet

Keeping a Pet is the sole responsibility of the Pet owner to ensure that they obey any conditions that were laid out as part of the Landlord’s agreement to keep the Pet. This may involve controlling any noise from a Pet to ensure its not excessive disruptive, or ensuring there is no damage to the property and that the animal is kept in good hygiene conditions. Failure to follow these conditions may result in a Pet agreement being revoked or in more serious cases lead to a break in the Tenancy agreement which may result in eventual eviction