About us
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Who owns the site?
The Renters Guide website is run through a limited company, The Renters Guide Limited.
The company is registered in England & Wales number 12876634 and is owned by us, its two directors, Tessa Shepperson and Harriet Thomas.
The Two Directors:
Tessa Shepperson
Tessa is a solicitor who has specialised in landlord and tenant law for many years. She is best known for her Landlord Law service, which is an online information service for landlords, and for her Landlord Law Blog.
Although Tessa is sometimes perceived as a ‘landlord solicitor’ she has always provided advice to tenants as well (for example through the blog), and it has been a long term ambition of hers to develop a special and separate service for tenants.
Harriet Thomas
Harriet is a solicitor who has specialised for over 10 years in housing and homelessness law. She has worked with several renter-focused charities and Law Centres, including Greenwich Housing Rights and Brixton Advice Centre.
She has a wealth of experience with housing law cases, ranging from possession, eviction, disrepair, mortgage repossession, to antisocial behaviour, and homelessness. Harriet provides a range of tenant-related services for organisations, which can be found on her website at Safer Housing.
The Purpose of the Renters Guide
The Renters Guide is intended to be a mostly free resource for all renters – be they tenants, lodgers or licencees – to help them understand the legal rules which apply to and which regulate their accommodation rights.
We know that many tenants struggle with this – which is hardly surprising as housing law is not taught in schools and is not well known even among qualified lawyers.
Even though there are already several excellent help sites available, such as those provided by Shelter and the CAB – we think there is also room for a different type of site such as ours.
We are particularly keen to provide guidance which is easy to understand – so if you find any of our advice content difficult, please let us know!
Independence and Funding
The site development has been funded entirely by Tessa and Harriet. We have not applied for any grant funding as we want the site to be totally independent.
Although all initial answers to the published questions are free, and most of the information articles are free – we also sell some additional articles and video help for those who require further information.
The income from the sale of these products will (we hope) enable us to fund the site on a long-term basis. All of our advice products, though, are deliberately priced low so they will be affordable by the majority of our users.
We will also get a limited income from the telephone advice service (although most of the fee goes to the solicitors providing the advice).
If you have found the site useful, it would be really helpful if you could make a small donation. This will help fund the gap between the site income (small) and the site costs (somewhat higher!).
A Service in Development
The Renters Guide site will never be finally ‘finished’. There are always new developments in housing law, so we will always be adding new content in response to legal changes and user demand.
However, if you cannot find an answer to your particular question, please let us know by completing our form here.
We try to provide answers to all new questions. This will help improve our service for other users.
How You Can Help
If you like our service you can help in a number of ways:
- You can tell us about any questions or topics you would like us to add
- You can follow us and promote us on social media – details are below
- You can buy one of our information articles – which will help fund the site
- You can make a donation – even a small sum will help us cover the expenses in running this service
But you don’t have to do anything – we will be very happy if you just use and enjoy the site. It it helps you – that is wonderful and is what the site is for!