Two national estate agents from their Tenants Arrears Tracker system state that since the last quarter of 2014, at least another 1,500 households are now finding themselves in this position of not paying, or unable to pay their rent. This is the equivalent of 2.2 % increase since the end of last year.

In the last twelve months numbers of tenants falling behind with rent by more than two months, has risen by 4%.

In the third quarter of 2012, the PRS experienced the highest peak of 116,000 households in rent arrears of two or more months. Since that ‘high’, the rate of increase has slowed down and in fact there have been significant decreases and in the fourth quarter of 2013, the number of households stood at just 63,400.

In spite of the number of tenant households in arrears steadily rising, it is felt that overall there is very little chance of a tenant falling into this category of rental arrears; in the first three months of 2015 only 1.4% of tenants were behind by two months.
 
March 2015 rental arrears stood at 7.6% whereas in the same month in 2014 it was at 7.8%, it is interesting to note that only five years ago, (Feb 2010) rental arrears was 14.6%

Adrian Gill, director of the estate agents chains, said: “Tenants are now far less likely to be out of work than at this point last year - a low-paid job is clearly better than no job at all, and this has had a massive effect on tenant finances as a whole. But the easy progress from a lower unemployment rate may now have been made. Earnings are a crunch point too. Many tenants are still struggling to keep up with household expenses in the face of extremely modest wages.

“There are some signs on the horizon this will improve, but in the meantime a small but significant minority of households are facing a real challenge to find the rent every month. Other factors are at play too. There are also more cases of severe arrears, in absolute terms, because there are more people renting their home overall. The chance of a given tenant failing to pay the rent within a couple of months is extremely low - and falling. The flipside to these figures are that more than 98% never get into serious arrears.”