Ed pledges to cap rent rises, extend standard tenancies & scrap fees

great - btl market crash! house prices crash! Yay!!!
then ripped off renters can buy the house for half what they pay in rent and housing benefit can stop subsidising.

sounds great.
lets build more council houses and renationalise (but with more customer control) energy and rail, too
and introduce living wage
then we could afford to live - maybe

If anybody has the cash without needing a mortgage and can afford a trip up north you may be able to snag a bargain.
A terrace is going for between 45k and 80k depending on area and obviously state of repair etc..
LLs are good here and tenants are in general good. A 2 bed will achieve £425pm
They are increasing though 2 identical houses one sold for 64k in August last year, the other last week for 80k

Surely Tiggy ll are already charging as much as they can in initial rents, raise the price and you will struggle to get a tenant no?

I'm so pleased that Labour has announced this. I haven't voted for them since Iraq, but this will get me back. There needs to be a party standing up for working people who don't have inheritance or extremely high earnings, it's about time they started developing policies like this.

The shadow housing secretary was on R4 this morning and she was far from impressive, they do need to pay attention to detail and present themselves more convincingly.

tiggy - i agree. ref price fixing - this could also have an effect on housing quality - if LL's can only charge a certain level of rent, the way to balance the books would be to cut maintenance, hence reducing the quality

no, I am not smug. I don't share your opinion. Not the same thing.

plenty of people move their lives for financial reasons. Some even get a better quality of life for it.

there are plenty of good properties for rent in this country. Renting a dump for a fortune because it is so damn essential to live in a particular area does not make sense. Complaining about it makes even less sense. Yes, there are bad landlords renting wrecks - so why not demand higher minimum standards from landlords? Can't see any sign of that.

now, I entirely agree that London is building a big problem because essential services workers are being priced out - but that is not the fault of the landlords. It is a long term issue, caused by lots of factors; selling off council houses, huge salaries for pointless jobs which inflates prices, foreign millionaires using the place as a tax shelter and many many others. I think London is grossly unsustainable and I wouldn't live there if I could. Perhaps if many others got out, there would be accommodation to spare - then ratholes would not have tenants?

I don't have the solution, but the endless 'screw the landlord, rich bastards' attitude annoys me as you can tell. Can't see anyone complaining about those who provide their mortgages, possibly because they don't have the visibility of a landlord.

I would not have a BTL if I could find an alternative home for my hard-earned money. But with inflation permanently high and savings rates so low, there are limited alternatives.

Beastofburden ... the reason for going the Collateralized Debt route is we still have an £108 billion a year budget deficit, heading for £1,500,000,000,000 (£1.5 trillion) of national debt by 2015 - so as we are already paying around £32 billion of annual interest on the current £1.3 trillion, we need to look at other solutions.

By borrowing the 'Collateralized' way, the debt is 'off UK balance sheet' as in effect, the institutional investors that buy the Local Authority bonds FINANCING social home building, where the tenant RENTS pay the annual bond coupon/interest - assumes the balance sheet 'risk', even if there isn't much risk.

For the more astute amongst you, you might point out that this is similar to the Sub Prime crisis in America that triggered the over leveraged financial crash in 2007. lol

Hence the brains needed to ensure this borrowing, on nowhere near the scale as the $trillions in America that banks loaned to HOME BUYERS who only needed a pulse to qualify, so default rates grew - is better handled as the interest is paid here by those renting, not owning - therefore on any tenant default, the Local Authority at least still owns the home and the interest may get paid by Housing Benefit.

Given myself a headache now, going to lay down for while. lol

those who pay a fortune for a dump have only themselves to blame

I'm not anti-landlord (as I said in my previous post, I'm pretty happy with mine, and only once in my twenty-year renting history have I had even a slight issue with a ll) but, specialsubject, your comment above is all kinds of wrong.

I live in the south east. It costs a fortune to rent here. Thing is...this is where I grew up. This is where my family and friends are. Where my elderly parents are. Where my son goes to school. Where I (and my dp, when he finishes his pgce and moves here) work. I work in the NHS, in a deprived part of south london. My dp will be a primary school teacher. Our life is here.

I'd like to think I make a contribution to society, living here, and I'm even arrogant enough to suggest that if all of the people like me and dp left, all the teachers and nurses and midwives and firefighters and shop assistants and cleaners and postmen and police, just because we'd be fools to 'pay a fortune for a dump'...well, the place would be pretty fucked, wouldn't it?

It's not enough to say, just move. It doesn't help anyone to say, you're an idiot for paying high prices. I wouldn't give a toss about not living near London. But London would, eventually, give a toss about living without me, and lots of others like me. Telling people that they're stupid for paying high rents is missing the point in spectacular fashion, and sounding pretty smug about it too.

Beastofburden....I partly answered your question re the need of the government to build and I suspect housing was a major part of the 'infrastructure' Osbourne was talking about when 'probing' the Government Bond Market investors re appetite for a 50-year dated bond, when our 10-year yields were under 2%.

I don't know how far that got, but we need to use our current credit standing in the world (where we have ONE AAA rating out of the three main agencies, looking positive for upgrade) to borrow SPECIFICALLY for home building at the lowest interest rate we can - before Miliband takes us the French route to debt prosperity, which never worked and since reversed having been downgraded twice.

I suspect some local authorities have been more receptive (and understand the concept of Collateralized Debt) than others.

The global institutional investors currently buying dodgy European credits/bond again, would love it, whether partially government guaranteed or not. IMO

I like how they did things in Quebec. If you were taking over a rental property and found out from the leaving tenant the amount they were paying in rent, this was the rent you paid. The LL couldn't up the rent to the new tenant. Also there were restrictions on how much the rent could be increased yearly (I thnk it was no more than 5%), and it had to be justified in detail by the LL.

For instance we paid 2700/mth rent on a place and as the LL had done significant works in maintenance, over 60k worth, and fixed our bathroom, she put up the rent. By 2%. As that is all she could justify. The bulk of the work was exterior maintenance which didn't affect our quality of living, and the bathroom was done on the cheap as the toilet was falling through the rotted floor and could not be put off.

Another scheme for people renting social housing was they paid in accordance to their earnings. If you had low income, you paid low rent, when you started earning well, you could stay in your social housing, but paid more rent. I like this scheme rather than the HB pit of despair the UK has dug for itself.

Dreaming …. Funny enough Miliband has mentioned that 200,000 figure for a while now and that is the ballpark figure we need, but so far all I have seen him do is THREATEN the large home builders with taxes, just as they start to make a decent profit and increase building after the uncertainties of a financial and economic recession.

Local Authorities building is a major part of the answer but we need the will and the brains to finance the borrowing , (partially?) covered by the expected rents – taking advantage of the current record near low interest rates. BTW I was gob smacked recently to hear there is a massive shortage of bricklayers, as they’ve gone off and done other things.

“Britain is facing a housing disaster as it is one million homes short, warns new report”

www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-2589483/Britain-facing-housing-disaster-warns-new-report.html
“Britain is now one million homes short of meeting its housing needs – a decade on from the flagship Barker Review of Housing Supply.”

“The 2004 report by Kate Barker, commissioned by the then Labour government, found that 210,000 homes needed to be built each year to prevent a housing crisis.”

“The economist also set a more ambitious target of ‘improving the housing market’ and making property more affordable by building 260,000 homes a year.”

“But a follow-up report shows that an average of just 115,000 homes a year have been built since then – meaning the country is 953,000 homes short of one target and 1.45million short of the other.”

“The chronic shortage of homes has locked many youngsters out of the housing market with 3.35million 20-to-34-year-olds living with their parents – 790,000 more than when the Barker Review was published.”

isitme it is ridiculous, though, that we have money to pay rents via housing benefit every year but can't build houses. If the government cant increase borrowing a bit and set that against future reductions in housing benefit, who can? .

There's such a difference between the modest, one-house landlord who will need to move back in again one day (the "numpties" I guess) and a business. A business might cope with this as long as eviction for non-payment and trashing etc works well. But a private landlord will stop renting if they fear never getting their house back again. I know Ed hasn't specifically said this yet, but the flavour is there, that it might become compulsory to renew leases after three years even if you actually want out. That's going to reduce the stock a fair bit, I think.

isitme - he probably got confused with the 0's. Or he's just saying that now and hope everyone forgets if they get into power

"200,000 new homes A YEAR ...I forgot to add.

Beastofburden ... the government has run out of money for homes or nuclear power stations, we had our chance to plan/build in the decade to 2007 but spent money on other things.

I believe the coalition is allowing local authorities to borrow to build, but I don't know what the conditions and/or uptake is to-date.

We need the Private Sector to build for now and recent home starts were at pre late 2007 financial crash levels.

Miliband says "we'll build 200,000 new homes", but the detail is missing, like HOW?

currently we charge our tenant a bit less than the market rate. if this comes in, when her next tenancy is signed we will increase the rent by as much as possible to take into account the fact that it won't rise during the tenancy - ie she will be paying more at the start than she would normally have done.

this assumes we continue as LL's though. If once we looked at the fine detail there was no way of evicting a bad tenant - ie someone who didn't show some respect to the propery - then there would be no point in continuing to a LL as it wouldn't cost in.

i'm sure in an ideal world there would be loads of good quality council stock built, ideally somewhere that didn't affect the greenbelt and everyone could live happily ever after. But where is all the money going to come from, apart from massive tax hikes i guess.

Iseenyou …. The ‘floor space’ that I am concerned about, hence gave a Shelter perspective that I found and provided, which has probably got worse, is that on the private rental properties available to rent and the affect on the rental sector should they sell.

I had read recently that major institutions like pension funds were looking to become Landlords, so that type of BTL interest WOULD stimulate more targeted building, but they will drop interest to provide if they think governments will cap anything, especially if the landlord is ‘institutional’ and seen as fair game.

“Labour's 'rent cap' row: how renting has grown, in charts”

“The charts and tables here show how property ownership is changing, who is renting – and for how much.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/buy-to-let/10800343/Labours-rent-cap-row-how-renting-has-grown-in-charts.html

“The subjects of renting and buy-to-let spark anger like few others and Labour's latest suggestion – that rent increases could be capped and minimum lengths of tenancies introduced – has added fuel to the controversy.”

“What are the facts behind Britain's growing army of renters? This graph, from the February 2014 English Housing Survey, shows that since 2005 ownership has been in decline relative to renting, which started to climb in 2000.”

“For the first time, according to this year's data, people renting from private landlords outnumbered social renters.”