Landlords love a good deal. They especially like getting deals before they come to market. One of the ways you might try to curry favour is through entertaining. Take agents out for a meal, solicitors to get the inside road on prorate properties. You might even take your tax advisor out to say thank you for saving you a load of tax again!
Is any of this an allowable expense? Nope! Entertaining is not an allowable expense. Never has been! Is it a good idea then? Well this is a great example of not letting the tax tail wag the dog. In other words if you want to do it even without tax relief then do it! The tax allowability of some spend is only one part of the spending decision.
It’s worth mentioning here that if you have an employee who reimburses you for entertaining (or your own company reimburses you) that doesn’t change anything. Employers can reimburse employees for costs incurred but the employer will still not get tax relief on the spend. So if you have a company and you are entertaining then you should get the cost to fall in to the company either directly or via expenses claim. Why? Well even though there is no tax relief on the spend it is better to spend it from the company funds otherwise the employee is paying it from post tax income.
What are the alternatives? Well sponsorship and advertising are allowable costs so you could sponsor the estate agents kids team and get tax relief no problem so long as the amount involved is commercial. In other words you can’t spend £10k sponsoring the local under 10’s team…