Tenancy Builder Update February 2023

Today (16 February 2023), we have updated Tenancy Builder and a few notable changes are worth mentioning.

Guarantors

A popular request has been for more flexibility with adding guarantors, particularly for larger joint and several tenancies. Now, you can associate any number of tenants with a guarantor or have some tenants with a guarantor and some without.

Adding a guarantor is now similar to adding tenants, whereby to add more, click the add button. You can select from tenants entered in the earlier pages to associate them with a particular guarantor.

This is a significant change to how guarantors work in the system. If you edit or duplicate a tenancy created before today, the guarantor details must be manually entered or altered again. We apologise for this; there was no way to avoid it, as new fields had to be created.

Fire instructions

In England, where a dwelling is part of a building containing two or more dwellings and a communal hallway for escape from fire, it's legally required to provide fire escape and fire door instructions to tenants. This must be done at the beginning of the tenancy and every year.

We have now added an option on the documents page to attach the Guild default fire instructions or upload your own.

We have also added this option for Wales contracts despite not being a legal requirement at this time (but why wouldn't you provide them when it's only a click, and as it was a Grenfell recommendation, it's likely to become law soon).

Upload documents

When uploading an attachment, there's a better visual experience in that a preview of the uploaded file is displayed so you can see if it looks okay.

We have also made some changes to how uploads work which should make the system more stable.

Stability

Most of the changes have been made to the background, which will significantly increase the speed and, over time, the overall stability. It may take a week or two to iron out further tweaks, as is often the case after a big update.