Lea Beven of Limecastle will be talking you through everything from how to be a great landlord to finding the perfect room in our new property blog.

Hello and welcome to what will hopefully be the first of many blogposts from Limecastle, a unique agency specialising in house shares and lettings.

We’ll be sharing some huge tips and tricks in lettings, helping you become the perfect landlord and guiding tenants in making sure they find something suitable and of good standard.

Taking in a lodger is back in trend at the moment.

It gives you room to breathe with the current financial climate as you can receive up to £4,250 each year tax free for renting a room. – that’s over £350 a month!

Getting a lodger can also make for good company; one of my own lodgers has now become a close family friend and even works as my accountant.

Professional house shares are popping up all over the place, but you do need to be careful about what you are signing up for as many are run by mean landlords or overrun with nightmare tenants.

Some of our stories will give you an insight into what living in a shared house can be like.

One key to making it work is to make sure your house share has got all bills included.

This means that no one will squabble about who owes what, and no one person can get victimised for using a lot.

You would be surprised at what happens.

A couple of weeks ago a young gentleman in Shrewsbury approach us to find a room for him with all bills included.

As it happens this chap had been sharing a house with 3 or 4 other strangers and arranged to have some of the utilities put in his own name, only to get a whopping great bill of over £1,000!

The other tenants refused to pay up and the landlord of course was not responsible, so in the end he has been saddled with a huge debt at a very young age.

Sad stories like this make us all the more determined to get this industry on track so it is our mission to make a difference in Shropshire and the  other three counties we cover!