Legal Briefings

Landlords can find the time and cost of legal procedure frustrating when tenants remain in premises failing to pay rent, and thumb their noses at the landlord who serves irritancy warning letters requiring them to pay rent on pain of termination.

What a landlord is looking for, having decided to irritate for these reasons, is a swift and effective process to allow them to terminate the lease and ship the tenant out. If that doesn’t work, the lawyers might find that they are in the firing line.

Two recent cases in Edinburgh have again illustrated the potential pitfalls in drafting these notices, and highlighted how important it is that those (usually solicitors) drafting them know exactly what they are doing.

In this briefing note we use these cases to discuss what to look out for when drafting irritancy warning letters.