The Recovery Process for a One-Off Residential Claim.
For an owner to have the best chance of successfully recovering monies owed to them, the agent should obtain a tribunal order in the relevant state. This tribunal order gives the owner a legally enforceable debt, whereas, without the order, all the owner has is an overdue invoice.
The traditional debt collection model says that the debt collector will only charge you X% (which could be 10, 15, 20, 30+% of the debt), but only if they recover the money.
What they don’t tell you is that there can be numerous other fees along the way, for example after a couple of phone calls they may tell you that they have to carry out a field call or refer it to their legal team or their lawyers.
Our process is different from the traditional debt collection model.
The model we have developed is a result of over 35 years of experience in dealing in the area of residential and commercial tenancies, acting for some 5,000 real estate agents Australia wide.
With the Barclay MIS model, the owner has the knowledge and safety of having all enforcement costs covered by a list fee, which is payable at the start of the action. With Barclay MIS, all enforcement litigation action is handled in-house, which means that the owner has a capped cost and is not subject to additional ongoing lawyers’ costs or court costs. The list fee covers the owner for all enforcement/litigation costs that may be involved.
Once Barclay MIS receive the tribunal order, we convert this to a general jurisdiction judgement for example a magistrate’s court judgement. This judgement will appear on the ex-tenant’s credit file for the next 3 years, meaning that should they apply for any form of credit, the judgement will appear on the credit providers search and will have a detrimental effect on their application.
Furthermore, the ex-tenant’s details will be listed on the Barclay MIS defaulting tenant’s database. This allows agents Australia wide to carry out our free of charge searches when somebody is applying for a new tenancy. This not only informs agents of the persons past default history but also gives Barclay MIS new information to pursue the ex-tenant.
On recovery of the monies claimed, we retain a recovery commission of 22% of monies collected. Both the list fee and the recovery commission are tax-deductible to the owner.