Hi, thought I'd ask this question here instead of with the council (they have some applications stuck at their end and I'd rather leave them stuck there with them a little longer)

What are the requirements on providing a lounge with a HMO property?
Considering adding a couple of extra rooms to some of my houses so I can increase my cashflow next year.
I'm not sure if I need to legally provide a lounge or not. What are other fellow HMO owners thoughts or feedback from their councils?

Thanks,
Bobby

Depends on your particular councils tech requirements. In Swansea you can have a HMO without a living room and is quite common. However the kitchen will have to be bigger to house a table to eat from. Ask the council on the phone for advice or they should have a info pack you can pick up will room sizes and requirements. Your council may not be that organised yet though. I keep on thinking every council is like Swansea which have been highly organised and the highest of HMO standards for 20 years.

One thing to consider is that you house will be licensed for X amount of bedrooms and requirements may be different between number of bedrooms, so it would be best to go for the extra bedroom and then use it as a lounge if thats what people want. Better than being licensed for 4 when you could use 5 bedrooms. At least you will be covered all angles.

John

Most definately contact your local council, to ask their particular requirments. As already stated every council implements their own HMO regs' picked from the guidelines passed down from central government.
Some councils are 'behind' others and have a more lenient approach to ther application of government HMO regs'. However there are other councils (Oxford and many other university citys) that are way out in front of other councils and are actually becoming more stringent in their application of Regs'.
I have found the local council more than helpful when needing advice regarding the do's and dont's. Contrary to popular belief they do actually want to work with landlords towards a better standard of accomodation and do not need to be treated as 'the enemy'. Of course this is only my opinion based on my experiance with my local council.

Dean.

One thing I noticed in reading a Council's HMO regs recently was that providing communcal space allowed smaller rooms to be let out.

And, it got complicated as it varied on what the communal space was! Kitchen. Kitchen/dining. Kitchen/living. etc. The allowable room space dropped as more communal space was available.

Also what was the single and couples size was listed separately, so
by providing a living room you could find you could let some of the middling sized rooms to couples, and not just to singles. Which obviouly increases rental incomes.

I recently lived in an HMO, (call it research!), and I noticed the kitchen/dining/living room were used early evening for eating, and rarely outside that time. In my opinion providing a bigger kitchen dining area is more important than providing a living room - people tend to relax in their own rooms.

I've still not worked out what to do with a tiny box room though - I've seen shared computing facilities provided, but I'm more convinced that offering the box room with another room to a couple for higher rent is more useful!

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I'm licensing my properties with lounges as bedrooms for that very reason, giving me flexibility later. I would like to remove the lounge in a bigger house as it has a dining kitchen and the congregating students cause further issues including smoking in a communal area which is banned by law.

Simon - For a small room you could make it into an ensuite / cloakroom and maybe a kitchenette and add it to a bigger room to make a self-contained bedsit providing a better rental income.