To have handed the new owners the no more HMO letter from the council regarding the street.

Ah!! I see you're just here to try put down the OP with your nitpicking

What is an HMO? I googled but didn't find anything. I can kind of guess from the posts, but would be grateful for clarification.

We were told there would be no more HMOs in our area, councillors talked about it to the papers and in person, made a big deal about cracking down on HMO.

There are still new ones popping up.

Does it matter?

This isn’t the estate agents fault!

this is the buyers fault for not doing the tiniest bit of research and their solicitor (assuming they told their solicitor their plans for the property)

Thats it basically, new owners of down the road have been at the property this morning with the builder.
They politely introduced themselves, I welcomed them to the street and said look forward to seeing them around.

did they come to you or you to them?

toddled back to mine

are you 2 years old?

It not about banning them. It’s about limiting them. That is sensible for all sorts of social and logistical reasons. There needs to be a balance to prevent overcrowding and a huge and unsustainable strain on local resources. I’m not against them. Both my siblings lived in them while saving for a mortgage deposit. But my sister moved out of one because her landlord wanted to ‘refurbish’, ie cram more people in.

@itsmeits I’d suggest contacting your local councillor as well as the council’s planning department so they are aware (and getting the nice neighbour to do this as well). I also live in an area with HMO restrictions (only so many allowed per street as well as planning permission needed for change of use), so even though planning permission might be allowed in principle, it wouldn’t be allowed under the restriction on numbers. Sounds as though you have a similar situation.

To the posters asking what is wrong with HMOs, it’s not the HMO itself but the issue when there are lots of HMOs in one street. Here the student HMOs tend to be in streets of terraced houses, meaning there are issues with parking (four students can mean four cars on a street with only on-street parking). There’s also the issue of noise, properties being poorly maintained by the landlords, the tenants caring less about the local area, changing the demographics of the area eg: fewer families. All minor things individually but they all add up.

Better to find out now, then later down the road. You didn’t tell them maliciously, it just came up in casual conversation.

you managed to get your home printer to work that quickly?! Impressed
Blimey, how long does your printer take. Once I open a document from a phone I jist press print and it's do e pretty much instantly.

And how many traffic wardens do you think there are to come round and enforce it?
We have them parking on yellow lines on the corner so that people can’t pull out of a T junction safely. It’s not far from a school so of course even if the residents aren’t parked there, the parents are. It’s absolutely chaos most weekdays.

I'd call the council right now and tell someone to get round there while the builder and the new owners are there.

There are lots of people selling courses on Instagram as to how to make millions in Property and this is their main vehicle at the moment. Flipping property is out of fashion because of the cost of materials.
So HMO’s are it

My sister lives in an area in Liverpool and the roads have been destroyed by HMOs. There is now a ban and resident's parking. You couldn't get four permits and there's a limit on the time allowed for visitors. So it at least helps with parking. There's also a crackdown on rubbish, which was another issue. Residents can no longer just buy as many bins as they want, so a HMO is more difficult to hide.

I don’t consider it to be an insult either. Pointing out other people’s ‘errors’ is, however, rude and patronising.

Well done - we have a rental flat and found the tenants had basically turned it into an HMO by bringing in partners - we had a new lease recently and had the choice of flat sharers, sisters, or a couple. One extra with the flat sharers would have been an HMO so we rejected them I'm afraid.

Good on you. We live in an area with a similar restriction on HMOs. It should have shown up on a search. So either they didn't bother to do one or they have a case against their conveyancer. And you have done them a favour by letting them know before they started work.

We had a recent case where the landlord evicted the family who had been living in the house for 5 years, spent the next 6 months doing it up, then advertised it to let as an HMO. One of the neighbours noticed and contacted the council. The landlord then had to put in a planning application for change of use, which got refused. The landlord has now put it up for sale.

Meanwhile round the corner, an instagram property developer who transforms houses into HMOs, is doing up a property. Once it is advertised to let as an HMO, their neighbours will be contacting the council's planning department.

If only we had similar restrictions on Airbnbs ...

There are different kinds of "people" occupying different kinds of HMO's. I don;t think anyone would have problems with doctors or university staff. But lots of HMO's are being let to druggies, unemployed, mental health sufferers, criminals, etc., and can drag the entire area down with their anti social activity. Only the OP will know what kind of area it is and what kind of tenants will be occupying the HMO. The mere fact that the council are restricted numbers tends to suggest that the typical tenants are more likely from the latter group above rather than the former!

At least they’re not shouting at you. From the thread title, i thought they were blaming you. Bit weird that he accused you of lying, but glad thst stopped and they’re dealing with it now.

Or he's one of the leech landlords who won't care about planning restrictions and do it anyway, sneekily and fraudulently. Not everyone complies with laws and restrictions and councils are very haphazard about who they issue enforcement against. After all, huge numbers of illegal workers are "housed" in places that are definitely illegal, but no one seems to care about them until something bad happens like a fire that kills someone.

I have lived in and next to HMO’s. They are absolutely necessary but a street shouldn’t be overwhelmed by them.

When I lived in tenements where most were student HMO’s, the kids were polite but the parties were loud and the landlords did the absolute bare minimum maintenance and deep cleaning, so we often had issues with mice, chasing absent or overseas landlords for their share of roof repairs, sorting damage after leaks etc.

Same with HMO’s let to council tenants, we had a lot of issues with antisocial behaviour, things being damaged and stolen from
communal areas, drug taking in the communal garden. People need to be housed. But being completely boxed in & overwhelmed by HMO’s isn’t fair, especially if you haven’t bought in a stereotypical student street next to a uni etc.

This should have been brought up in the searches and if the council haven’t made it clear that an HMO is a no then the council might have stuffed up

The house I am in at the moment, when the searches were done it came back that a tube station was going to be built nearby

The Tube station that had been up and running for years.

Last house I had, the council read the map wrong and said that the houses on the road road were going to lose several feet of front garden when the road was widened

Services such as gas, electric, BT ran under the edge of the front gardens, right beside the road
The colour to indicate services on the map was confused with the colour that indicated road widening would be taking place

Councils make mistakes and if this wasn’t added to their searches then it could be argued that the council are at fault and compensation needed to be paid. Which would mean higher council tax to pay for it (are you in Northamptonshire by any chance)(or Croydon)

I think if you live near multiple HMOs then the impacts on you are higher. Noise, parking and rubbish are the main ones. I used to work for the council and HMO’s would have a much higher incidence of issues. Bin bags hiding under recycling. Recycling bins being full of general waste. Bins being overfilled so lids couldn’t close. I’ve threatened to remove bins from an HMO a number of times. Then charged to empty the lot of them so they get a fresh start, and followed up.

They potentially didn’t do any searches. You don’t HAVE to. It’s stupid not to, especially if you want to make changes like they do.