Today, our life is due to be made several notches more complicated thanks to the arrival of a border terrier puppy. Naturally, the junior Millards are overjoyed. Mr Millard is less sure. “We’ll never be able to go on holiday again,” he grumbles. “It’s impossible to rent a house if you have a dog.” But is it?

Richard Savage rents out three cottages on his charming Cotswold estate via Rural Retreats. “You have to have a line in holiday lettings, and ours is not to have pets,” he tells me. “It’s like smoking. We don’t allow animals, because of the mess and people’s allergies. I’m told the few owners who do accept pets get extra business because of it, but we don’t.”

“Oh, please don’t talk to me about pets,” says Philip Stewardson, a busy landlord with 65 rental properties in the West Midlands who is very familiar with the pet issue. “Our tenancy agreement excludes pets. Or, rather, it used to. But so many people lie – or wait until they have moved in, then buy one – that we had to create a new agreement.” The worst case? A tenant who hid 10 dogs in the cellar.

“A neighbour called us and said that he had heard dogs barking, but had never seen them. So we went round. When the tenant answered the door, I heard barks coming up from the cellar. Even then, despite the yapping, he denied their presence. We told him they had to go. We told him he had to go. We reported him to the RSPCA. In the end, we took legal action, because he wasn’t paying his rent, either.”

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Tax reforms

• Into the sunset

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Degrees of success

• Tales of a landlady: It pays to shop around

• Tales of a landlady: Residents only

• The ties that bind

• How low can you go?

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Avoiding the agents

• Tales of a landlady: In the dock

• Tales of a landlady: the age of reason

• Tales of a landlady: Heroes and villains

• Tales of a landlady: High maintenance

BACKGROUND

• Back to the ’burbs

• A waste of energy?

• Tenants like gardens, but not tending them

• In the doghouse

• Parking mad

It’s eviction time

Can investors profit from the rise in repossessions?

• It’s eviction time

BACKGROUND

• Do property workshops work?

• A letting gamble

• Spread betting

• When buy-to-let turns from a hobby into a living

Tales of a landlady: Persistent complaint

How can lettings agents justify annual renewal fees, asks Rosie Millard

BACKGROUND

• Landlords: halo or horns?

• Bidding wars

• Time to quit the ring?

Stewardson is wearily accustomed to the illicit arrival of four-legged cohabitants. “We have a house that has become vacant this week, and the tenants had installed a cat flap in the door. Just drilled one in. We’ve had someone with a snake. Actually, that was no problem at all. It was pretty quiet. We had one tenant with a white rat. We knew about it, and that was okay. She kept it in the lounge. She would let it out of its cage to sit on her knee and watch television.”

Dogs are a landlord’s worst enemy, Stewardson says. “The fleas they bring in are appalling. A dog can lay fleas in a carpet and they will remain dormant. Then, if the house is empty for a few weeks, the footprints of the subsequent tenants wake them up and the fleas come alive.

“We’ve had to fumigate whole houses. Now, if a tenant brings a dog in and it’s not a rottweiler, we say that’s okay, but we must have a larger deposit, and the carpets must be cleaned professionally after they move out. If you say they can’t have a dog, they’ll bring it in anyway. Something about the British and their love affair with animals.”

The British love affair with animals is sometimes enough to force a landlord, or a lettings agent, to say a categorical “no”.

“We tend not to allow pets,” says Keith Hollinrake, from Hunters agency, in York. He vividly recalls his most memorable pet-property moment.

“A client who was selling his house had saved all the crap from his dog as fuel for his open fire,” Hollinrake says. “He collected it for years, all dried out by the fire. I have never known a smell like it. When you went in, your eyes were streaming. Afterwards, you had to go home and almost throw your clothes away.” He pauses. “In most cases, our landlords don’t allow dogs, for obvious reasons.” Quite.

Some agents, however, feel that landlords, particularly rural ones, should relax a bit. After all, using dog poo as fuel is hardly common behaviour. “Landlords are becoming extremely difficult about taking pets,” says Jane Russam, head of lettings at Lane Fox in Banbury, Oxfordshire. “I have great houses I could let over and over again, but can’t because the landlord won’t have pets.

“I have one house in Shipton-under-Wychwood where a long-term tenant is willing to pay £795 a month, possibly for about 10 years. And the landlord is prepared to turn her away because she has one dog. To me, that is ridiculous.”

Russam is familiar with the situation. “Tenants get desperate. They want to bring in dogs; they want to bring in cats. I’ve had people wanting to bring in chickens. Some have six or seven dogs. When I hear that, I just laugh. They send us ‘pet portfolios’, with photos of the dogs, to show how wonderful they are.” How sweet. Does it cut any mustard with the landlord? “It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.”

In the city, it is even worse. With short-term tenancies, landlords appear to be even fussier. Mason Brooks, lettings manager for Hurford Salvi Carr in Limehouse, east London, says that some tenants abhor even following a tenant who had pets. “Europeans don’t want to live in flats that have had animals in them,” he says. “Something about allergies. French people don’t like the idea of a cat having been on their sofa.”

So, what are Brooks’s guidelines? “Generally, in new-build city blocks, pets are allowed only at the discretion of the managing agent and the landlord. Budgies are usually okay.”

And what about dogs? “Very difficult to get the nod.” Just as well I’m not looking to rent a family home, frankly.

Buy-to-let advice from Rosie Millard can be found at timesonline.co.uk/investmentproperty

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