Home REIT - a City-backed investment trust providing affordable homes for homeless people and prison leavers – has taken back 600 properties from a charity landlord.

Liverpool-based Big Help has agreed to give up the leases which equate to about 30% of Home REIT’s portfolio after paying no rent for more than a year in a protest over housing conditions, reports MailOnline.

A Big Help spokesman says: “We are delighted that after robustly defending our position for over 18 months we have been completely vindicated.

Home REIT is now accepting the return of these leases that were handed over to us in a substantially different state of repair than our contracts had agreed, with significant shortfalls for maintenance budgets for each home.”

The tenancies – a mixture of private rented sector tenants and social tenants - will transfer to Home REIT, which says it can now increase rent collection and “open up new opportunities”.

Trouble

Home REIT was set up to buy residential properties and lease them at affordable rents to charities and public bodies but has run into trouble after allegedly inflating the value of its stock.

It was suspended from the stock exchange last January after it failed to file accounts on time.

The firm is now offloading swathes of its portfolio and during the past year has completed on the sale of 585 properties and exchanged on a further 262.

Last month, Home Holdings, part of Home REIT, put another raft of HMOs onto the market in a bid to shore up losses.