Official figures show the huge sums of money being held in tenancy deposit protection schemes.
The total value runs into many hundreds of millions, with the Tenancy Deposit Scheme for England and Wales alone protecting £1.2bn – £340m more than any other scheme.
The figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government for each scheme are:
Deposit Protection Service: £901,510,446 (custodial) and £12,444,828 (insured).
MyDeposits: £693,628,472.
TDS: £1,258,440,470.
Official figures also show that TDS Northern Ireland has taken 75% of the market in its first year, and 58% of the market in Scotland since deposit protection became mandatory in July 2012.
Despite the vast sums of money – and the equally extraordinary amount of admin involved – very few tenancies end in disagreement over deposits.
In its annual review for 2013/14, TDS’s dispute rate in England and Wales is reported as less than one in 100, at just 0.87%, equating to 9,500 disputes in the year.
The average amount disputed is £860, and the dispute results of total going 52.3% to tenants, and 47.7% in favour of landlords or agents.
The biggest causes of deposit disputes remain cleaning (53%) and damage (46%).
Whilst Scotland has followed similar patterns for disputes as England and Wales, TDS Northern Ireland gave some surprising results where rent arrears was the biggest cause of dispute and 60% of the total awards went to the landlord or agent.
The annual report also gives some idea of the work involved with the TDS’s customer contact centre handling 83,131 calls, and 35,487 emails. The average speed in answering a call was 23 seconds, well inside the Government’s target of a minute.
The report also shows that TDS has almost 2,600 member letting agents, mostly members of ARLA, NAEA, RICS, NALS or the Law Society.
TDS made an operating loss of £33,000 during the year, which it says was due to cutting prices to agents – offering loyalty bonuses plus discounts for agents’ own good performance.
However, thanks to interest received, it made a surplus of £108,811.
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