Annual RTB charge - my experience

Nordkapp

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Thought I would share my stressful experience of this messy RTB annual charging.

So I have properties registered and between the jigs and the reels I was aware through the media of the annual charge. I didn’t pay much heed to it because over the last decade or so the PRTB would normally write out or email.
Heard some story this week about fines and the fiasco over refunds so I got a little worried about my own registrations.
Righty so, looks like my account no longer exists, one has to create a new account and chose to link to an existing registration. Now I’m really worried, as you know the old registration lasted 4 years so paperwork is few and far between. Said paperwork never had a date, never quoted landlords account number! Receipts were logged in the account so I had no pdf copies. Looking at my records confirmed some issues, 2018 and 2020 were the last renewals, so I felt I would be goosed on the former but was heavily relying on PRTB notifications. Found two letters with the RT registration numbers, without which or the account number I had the foresight to write down on an RTB letter a few years ago saved my bacon.
Linking to the existing registrations drew a blank last night, so feared the worst on a call with the RTB this morning. Upshot is, the existing registrations fed into my account overnight. Luckily for me I appear to have a 2023 renewal for the 2018 registration and a September renewal fee for the 2020 registration, go figure that one out! Took no chances and took a screenshot of the account as my evidence of renewal due dates.

They did qualify that an email will issue to prompt renewal but at least, in my case, no fines and everything seems to be available again, but what a way to run a government section.
 
Just logged in there to get the tenancy reference number for a tenancy and was greeted with the same "we dumped all your old accounts, start again" message. This shower are quite simplly utterly incompetent. This will be my third time registering an account with them. It always felt very ramshackle and thrown together. It's nice to know this is the sort of stuff they are spending the annual registration fees on. And no use to landlords at the end of the whole thing either. We fund an organisation that does absolutely nothing for us, but cost us our time and our nerves.
 
I have always found the RTB system the most clunky and awkward to use, and its still the same as far as I can see. Why should we have to create a new account? Anyway I tried to do this and was unable to use my current email address as system tells me that that email address is already in use? Reluctantly I tried to use a different email address I only use rarely and their system then tells me that I need to contact RTB via webchat to complete the account setup. However there's a message on their site saying that webchat has been suspended since 22nd Aug 2022 due to unprecedented call volumes. The whole RTB experience is a joke and as far as I can see this annual registration requirement is just another ruse to get property owners to fund the RTB. I sent an email to RTB last night requesting assistance on the above and unsurprisingly have heard nothing back since. Late registrations will incur a fine and these fines will then be refunded later due to the ongoing issues with reregistration process. You couldn't make it up..
 
They can just dump our previous accounts because, they can! No normal business could afford to do that. A new system would be created if needs be but the data would have to be migrated over. Under absolutely no circumstances would a business be able to bin all its customers' accounts and ask them to start again. They'd be out of business in a week. This lot get to do it because their "customers" are forced to pay and there is no alternative "supplier". It is reprehensible how badly run the PRTB is, especially the IT side of things. I worked in backend development long enough and have seen migrations of data sets millions of times larger than whatever few hundred thousand records the PRTB has (had) in their old database. It would have been child's play to migrate that (almost static) data to a new database (if that was even needed, though I suspect the DB structure was probably appalling too, judging by the rest of it).

This is the rubbish they waste our money on.
 
Just logged in there to get the tenancy reference number for a tenancy and was greeted with the same "we dumped all your old accounts, start again" message. This shower are quite simplly utterly incompetent. This will be my third time registering an account with them. It always felt very ramshackle and thrown together. It's nice to know this is the sort of stuff they are spending the annual registration fees on. And no use to landlords at the end of the whole thing either. We fund an organisation that does absolutely nothing for us, but cost us our time and our nerves.
Absolutely agree after 10 years plus experience with them.Is it any wonder that landlords try to bypass them.?
 
Thought I would share my stressful experience of this messy RTB annual charging.

So I have properties registered and between the jigs and the reels I was aware through the media of the annual charge. I didn’t pay much heed to it because over the last decade or so the PRTB would normally write out or email.
Heard some story this week about fines and the fiasco over refunds so I got a little worried about my own registrations.
Righty so, looks like my account no longer exists, one has to create a new account and chose to link to an existing registration. Now I’m really worried, as you know the old registration lasted 4 years so paperwork is few and far between. Said paperwork never had a date, never quoted landlords account number! Receipts were logged in the account so I had no pdf copies. Looking at my records confirmed some issues, 2018 and 2020 were the last renewals, so I felt I would be goosed on the former but was heavily relying on PRTB notifications. Found two letters with the RT registration numbers, without which or the account number I had the foresight to write down on an RTB letter a few years ago saved my bacon.
Linking to the existing registrations drew a blank last night, so feared the worst on a call with the RTB this morning. Upshot is, the existing registrations fed into my account overnight. Luckily for me I appear to have a 2023 renewal for the 2018 registration and a September renewal fee for the 2020 registration, go figure that one out! Took no chances and took a screenshot of the account as my evidence of renewal due dates.

They did qualify that an email will issue to prompt renewal but at least, in my case, no fines and everything seems to be available again, but what a way to run a government section.
Good morning Minister, and welcome to AAM.
 
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