To not believe people who claim to think housing is an uncontroversial investment

And to add to this: if we had a huge crash, banks would suddenly want much more than a 10% deposit to protect themselves so suddenly that £10k would become £30-40k

OP, not everyone needs to buy a house, Not everyone wants the hassle of maintenance. Not everyone is at a point in their life when they want to buy.

I spent three years in London as a student, and halls of residence rooms were only available for 18 months. For the rest, and then the three years afterwards while I saved a deposit, I rented a bedsit. I wanted to rent a bedsit.

My landlord was a man who owned two tatty Georgian houses in West Norwood, divided into bed sits. I didn't like him much but his properties were cheap, basic and available. They served a practical purpose.

Him owning three houses was not contentious at all. Private landlords are not criminals.

I'm very old, but I'm bemused by the idea that someone who takes cocaine could possibly see themselves as morally superior to a landlord.

I'm pretty sure that buying and using illegal drugs which fund terrorism, rape, abuse and other delights is worse than renting out a house to someone who needs it.

And I'm not a fan of BTL.

I'm currently renting out of choice. It's a lovely house and a reasonable rent. My (private) landlord owns a lot of property in the local area and I think it's great they're providing decent houses on long-term lets. It's a home for me and my family even though we don't own it.

Totally

I don’t think any of my friends wanted to live in our own aged 21. We wanted to live with other young people and have a fun sociable flat. We just didn’t want to be financially tied to each other for more than 24 months.

There are 2 main problems I see with this logic:

1. Even if you said a property was 100k, a 5% deposit is still 10k. How many people do you think have £10k just sat in the bank ready to go?

2. Even if everybody did have 10k ready to go,
   not everybody would be approved for a mortgage- age, adverse credit, missed payments, insecure employment, self employment with not enough years books

And even then, home ownership comes with its own costs. If you can only just afford this imaginary 100k house and 2 weeks in the boiler breaks, or the oven, or you get a leak, that’s yours to sort and pay for as a homeowner. Not long after we moved into our first home we ended up having to spend another £4-5k on various repairs, not everybody has that cash and it’s possibly the one main appeal of renting- those things don’t come out of your pocket.

Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t like to rent, and I also would never choose to be a landlord, but it’s not as simple as you make it out to be. If all the landlord’s packed in tomorrow all that would happen is a huge rise in homelessness.

I didnt want to buy at 21. I rented and moved around a lot. In lots of European countries people rent for life. Our issues are poor landlords, constantly rising rents and poorly maintained properties.

And what is going to make them fall so? Forcing LL’s to sell won’t do that, that’s massively naive and student politics at best.

Save your venom for the second home owners who leave properties empty for most of the year. Given the new extensions in tenant rights at least BTLs provide homes for people to live in that they can't so easily get chucked out of. It's not as secure and autonomous as social housing or home ownership but it's better than having nowhere to live. Not everyone can afford to buy and without a massive social housing building program (as happened after the 2 WWs) most people won't have access to social housing either.

Yeah Id worry about sorting that out more than lecturing on somebody having a BTL which still provides housing to people.

Quite a lot of assumptions:
most people want to buy
most 21 year olds want to live on their own

Show your workings that if every single BTL landlord sold their property, that the average price of property (and you dont seem to be specifying an area or type of property, are you talking about a one bed, 5 bed, detached, 2 up/2down etc etc), would crash to 100k

1. Because buying a home takes ages and is stressful and expensive. If you’re planning to move every two years (as I did, and most of my friends, for the first decade of our adult lives) it’s a silly thing to do. The stamp duty alone would have cost a year’s rent.
2. Because when you’re young you don’t know who you’re going to settle down with, if anyone. Buying a flat with your university boyfriend/girlfriend aged 21 is silly, as you’re likely to be broken up within a year or two and then disentangling the ownership is a nightmare, as endless break-up threads on here can attest. Better to rent with friends/a partner and then it’s easy come, easy go.

Basically buying only makes sense if you’re planning to live in the same place, with the same person, for quite a few years to come. That might have been you aged 21, but it wasn’t me.

Not that’s wage stagnation and the increase in house prices

Because they could never afford a property on their own in that area so need a rental house share? Because they can’t afford to save enough for a deposit? Because they don’t plan to be in that area for long enough to buy there? Because they are students and only need a short lease?

No, I couldn’t care less. Unless you are prepared to study the inner workings of institutional finances, much of which is hidden despite how much anyone looks; investing in stocks and shares will likely be indirectly investing in property anyway.

I have asked on countless threads for examples using real life numbers to evidence this

Im yet to see anything that makes sense

Please show your workings.

Yanbu op but you'll get shouted down on here because mumsnetters are on average more affluent than the general population and the BTL landlord mumsnetters swoop onto every thread like this to nake sure there's a loud chorus of how important it is to provide rental accommodation.

In most cities there are way more people stuck in rental accommodation desperate to buy but who keep being outbid by BTL landlords than there are people looking to rent. Every time a BTL landlord buys a house they make the problem worse. City councils should assess how many rental properties the local population genuinely needs and should require all btl landlords to buy an annual licence for their property with a ceiling on the number of licences available and you are required to sell within 6 months if you don't get a licence (no individual or company other than social housing landlords allowed more than 3 such licences unless there are spares left after the annual deadline, which can be shared proportionately among applicants). The excess rental stock will have to be sold off relatively cheap to the first time buyer owner-occupiers who were previously priced out.