No Letting Go Cardiff

For landlords and agents wanting to understand what actually wins deposit disputes, the published data from TDS, DPS, and mydeposits is the source

What the schemes consistently report year on year:

- Cleaning is the most common dispute category

- Damage to walls, floors, and decor follows

- Most disputes split between tenant and landlord rather than going fully one way

- Inventories produced by an independent clerk carry significantly more weight than landlord-produced ones

The data is publicly available on each scheme’s website and is worth a read for anyone building or reviewing their inventory process.

Earlier this month a colleague flagged a balcony as missing from a check-out report. Not the balcony key. The actual balcony.

We are still not over it!

If anyone reading this has a stranger one, the comments are open. The bar is high.

Lovely flat. Lovely floor. Lovely Golden doodles who turned out to be entirely unbothered by a routine property visit, and who appear in roughly half of the inventory photos as accidental cameos.

This is one of the genuinely nice parts of the job.

Pine cladding, original light fittings, a shelf of ceramics that have been in exactly the same order since some point in the late seventies. Whoever takes this tenancy on is moving into a small time capsule.

Genuine message in our franchisee group chat.

A landlord brought paperwork from their previous inventory provider over to NLG for review.

One whole bedroom was missing from the report. Not photographed. Not described. Not on the contents schedule.

If the property had gone into a deposit dispute, any damage in that room would have had no baseline to compare against.

This is what people mean when they say a thin inventory is worse than no inventory. At least with no inventory, both parties know where they stand.

Sealed unit failed. Moisture between the panes.

Looks like a small aquarium minus the fish.

The window will need replacing. Not today, not next week, but eventually.

The kind of thing that ends up in a check-out conversation if nobody had logged it before.

We don't think this one can be topped...

We’ll let that one speak for itself....

A standard deposit dispute through one of the schemes (mydeposits, TDS, DPS) typically takes 8 to 12 weeks from claim to adjudication. During that window, the deposit is locked. The landlord is doing back-and-forth correspondence, gathering photos, writing statements, sometimes re-visiting the property. If the case loses, the deposit goes back to the tenant in full, regardless of the actual damage.

A professional inventory takes between 90 and 150 minutes on site (depending on property size), plus the time to produce the report. It costs a fraction of a single disputed deposit.

The math here isn't complicated.

An inventory pays for itself the first time anything is contested, and most landlords have something contested at least once across a portfolio every year or two.

The landlords who skip the inventory to save money tend to be the same ones who lose two or three disputed deposits and then book one anyway. Just later, after it's already cost them.

A standard property inventory is one tenancy, one signature, one shared space. HMOs are different. Multiple tenants, multiple individual agreements, shared kitchens and bathrooms, and a landlord who needs evidence on each room separately.

When a tenant in Room 3 leaves, you need a check-out for Room 3 specifically and a clear record of the shared spaces at that moment. Nine months later, when the tenant in Room 4 leaves, the same shared spaces have to be documented again, against a baseline that's already shifted.

This is the work that goes wrong fastest with a generic inventory provider. Either every tenant gets billed for damage that wasn't theirs, or no tenant gets billed for damage that clearly was.

A proper HMO inventory tracks each room individually plus the shared spaces over time. Photos cross-referenced. Conditions logged at every check-in and check-out, not just at the start.

Cardiff and surrounding area HMO landlords and agents, feel free to get in touch with us if support is required. The setup is different, and getting it right at the start saves arguments per-room for years.