To think hording something essential for life is despicable

[sandrabedminster]

www.telegraph.co.uk/money/special-reports/i-have-three-properties-at-age-33-and-3000-a-month-to-save-do-i/

Its not jealousy before someone says it, I own my own home but I doubt my children will ever be able to. But shelter is something essential and all this speculation is causing lots of damage as prices are pushed ever higher. I know a friend that spends 70% of net income just on renting something that is too small for her.

Yes scary I completely agree with you about not automatically raising the rent.

However, what labour was proposing at the last election from what I understand was to cap rents even between tenancies. I don't know the full details. But to me, that sort of policy would encourage unscrupulous landlords. Why would a landlord bother to change kitchens/bathrooms/carpets/redecorate when you can only charge say 3% more than the existing rent? The outlay of such changes can run into the tens of thousands even on a small property. Thus tenants would then be forced to live with 30+ year old barely functioning kitchens and bathrooms slowly leading to slum conditions because of poorly thought out government policy.

Reads like a moan about "entitlement" to own property.

Sandra that really was a well thought out answer to all the points I raised. Very concise and precise.

I actually do this with my tenants. It is a mutually advantageous situation as it is cheaper to keep the tenants in a functioning property than to change tenants more. I am chronically ill and cannot work. The properties are my pension. I aim for my long term tenants pay £75 - £100 below current market rates. One tenant pays £750 instead of the current remarket rate of £875. The house could definitely do with a lick of paint and the carpets are a bit dog eared. I had a call from the agent the other day asking me if I wanted to increase.

Rents are rising in London www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/05/rents-continue-rise-uk-london. Not helped by the Government's interference in the market - the effective new stmp duty and the new taxation on landlords.
Most landlords would not mind an inflation restriction on rent increases for existing tenants as few increase rents above inflation anyway if they have a good tenant they want to keep who are in decent properties. A void period of 1 - 2 months is a massive loss during which period you still have to pay your mortgage on the place so avoiding that by keeping a tenant is what most seek to achieve.

You could also nationalise with or without compensation all property ownership as Soviet Russia did and China/Cuba/ North Korea etc too. However there is no stomach for that in most democracies.

My ownership of rentals is historical and started when we moved abroad with work because our home would have been difficult to rent out so we made the choice to sell it and split the money into two much smaller properties in a suitable location to keep our money in the housing market for when we returned home to the Uk. Throughout the almost 10 years away, our desire and requirements for a home changed and so we bought another property to be able to buy what we wanted when we returned. In the event, the market crashed in 2008 just as we returned unexpectedly to England having been away for almost 10 years. Nothing was selling, the market was on a slow down and we were advised not to try to sell. These houses were 1.5 hours drive away from where we moved back to so living in one wasn't an option. The lenders were getting itchy about lending to first time buyers, who would have been our target and it was a disaster for us. We managed to scrape together a small deposit just before lending completely collapsed and we bought what we could afford using the money we had saved. When the market picked up a bit, we sold a house to extend ours.

We will keep hold of our remaining properties as a pension plan as I am now chronically ill and too ill to work and get a pension in my own right if I live to 65.

lljkk I feel no entitlement or other and I was once in a very different position financially. I gave up my ability to become a higher paid professional when I moved abroad fit and healthy and returned 10 years on slowly becoming more and more ill. I rented as a student in what would today be considered slum conditions in the late 1980's/early 90's so I am well aware of the squalor some tenants live in.

We bought easy to maintain modern circa 10 year old properties with good roofs, wiring and heating. I don't know why a landlord would choose to buy damp old buildings and rent to squalid conditions.

What I choose to do with my money is my concern and I will do what I am able to ensure I can pay for my hefty medical bills, which are not funded by the NHS as the drug I need is not yet licensed or funded here although I understand I am in a self funded medical trial. I could come here and bleat about how I receive no help and I don't because I have found another way to help me. I am a positive person and leave the bleating and wingeing to those, who are not. I pay for my own counselling and Physiotherapy and never applied for Disablilty Living Allowance when it existed as I left this to be given to those, less fortunate than me. No one know me in real life and judgements of strangers is very silly.

Should I say your post reads like an excuse to avoid to address my what I said in my first post?

Scary just read the whole thread. Yes, we rented in Belgium and were handed a massive maybe 100 page document, which apparently was the inventory and had been prepared by 2 lawyers. I was informed about unscrupulous landlords taking massive chunks out of the desposit from foreigners. So as the document was done by Francophones and being fluent in French, I spent a week going through it, picked out anything I didn't agree with and sent a large document with all the modifications. The lawyers acknowledged receipt and when we exited the property, we were handed a very small bill. That week was well worth it.

The house was owned by a big jewellery company I understand with a large portfolio of properties. They were awful landlords. Their aren't told us the inside work in the house would be completed before we moved in and the outside work within 4 months of us moving in. We signed a contract agreeing to a contractor to be on the property during those 4 months and because it was poorly worded, none of the inside work was completed and when we complained, he told us he had 4 months to complete. The penalty for tenants breaking the 9 year contract during the first 3 years was something like 6 months rent to be paid to the landlord after exiting the property and the landlord could have tenants in situ for the 3 remaining months effectively getting double rent for those 3 months if my memory serves me correctly.

Dunno when that was, most renting in Belgium is on3 year standard lease now. There is a penalty for breaking it early: in 1st year it's 3 months rent, 2nd year it's 2 months, 3rd year it's 1 month. Sounds like something wasn't explained adequately and they took advantage of the foreigners. The finding of spurious excuses to keep all of the deposit is accurate and applies to locals as well as foreigners. I've not had a British landlord return a deposit for 16 years, only happened once. They have to redecorate after 9 years by law - I've never known a British landlord to redecorate except in extremis - and rent increases are controlled. You can change whatever you want in the house as long as you put it back on leaving. Private renting is a bad deal anywhere, there are pros and cons between Belgian and British renting, but Britain is not a tenants wonderland in comparison.

And incidentally I saw that myth rear up again somewhere... renting is not more common on the continent any more, Britain's owner occupation rate is falling and lower than many other countries'now.

Uh oh

Some Landlords are shit.
Some Tenants are shit.
There are pros and cons for renting and buying - I rented a flat for 26 years (paying well below market rate as I decorated, replaced some furniture out of my own pocket etc as I thought fair) and I now have a mortgage on a house. As a mortgagee I will be paying much, much more than the sale price and must maintain a contingency kitty for essential repairs.
I could complain bitterley about the Lender taking thousands off me - greedy bastards - But no-one forced me to get a mortgage!

There will ALWAYS be a need for a large rental market - for many and varied reasons. Whether owned by Council or Private or Housing Association is pretty irrelevant to the person paying the rent surely?

I'm getting a little tired of having to repeat the same things again and again to satisfy those who so desperately want to cling onto their privilege in a land of growing inequality... or maybe I'm just up late and irritable...

Council renting over private makes a difference because you used to get security of tenure, much more regulation around the state of the buildings, much less flouting of that regulation (no, the public sector ain't perfect but it is much more accountable than private), lower rents, and society benefits by the recycling of public funds rather than having it sucked away into fewer and fewer private hands. You can treat them as homes. The psychological and community benefits to that last are enormous.

The public sector is always better than private in matters of key infrastructure, more efficient in terms of total use of a societies' resources, more effective, more accountable, and leads to a more equal society without a large poorer population being dependent on the whims of the fewer rich ones. That is why it is so hated by the fewer rich who want to leverage their pre-existing greater wealth to gain ever larger proportions of the societies' total wealth. We cannot afford these levels of private greed any more, they are what is destroying our economy, our environment, and destroying the existing social fabric with only the fabric of a much smaller world, that of family connection/ nepotism and land ownership to put in its place.

The Victorian pre-public sector world was shit despite the nostalgia of the tories, and the destruction of half the socioeconomic fabric taking us back there entails impoverishes all of us, including those at the top eventually.

Whether owned by Council or Private or Housing Association is pretty irrelevant to the person paying the rent surely?

Council/HA give secure long term tenancies, generally maintain higher standards than private LL, offer the right to buy after so long (which I think should stay but for every house they sell, they ought to buy another) allow pets and won't say "sorry, no can do," when I ask if I can change my daughters ugly brown, job lot carpet to a nice cream one, out of my own pocket and paint her walls a colour other than magnolia.

I would give my right arm for a council/HA property, unfortunately, they sold them all off and they ultimately ended up in the hands of BTL.

They are building/buying more in my town but due to work, caring responsibilities, school and not driving I'm v fixed as to how far I can move and there are none in my area as yet.

ps actually sandra what janecc said rings true, just out of date. I didn't mean to cast that sort of doubt. Rent leases were 9 yrs in Belgium not that long ago, they still call them 3-6-9 leases. And they are still a bit xenophobic over there. The price of living / arguing with the same neighbours for hundreds of years compared to our isolated island luxury... I can't imagine how static that world must have been to have a 9 yr standard lease!

pps sorry I seem to have made the comment prompting my ps up... past my bedtime.

Whether owned by Council or Private or Housing Association is pretty irrelevant to the person paying the rent surely?

Not to anyone who wants to relax and feel 'at home'.

I would give my right arm for a council/HA property, unfortunately, they sold them all off and they ultimately ended up in the hands of BTL.

Isn't "sold off" the result of right to buy? Most that end up btl do so because the council tenants buy very cheaply under rtb, then sell at market price.

Stop rtb? Or place covenants that if you sell it must be to an owner occupier, or they must sell back to the council at the original price + any increase in market value?

I would have given my right arm as a private landord for a reliable, long term tenant who didn't mind sorting property maintenance and decoration (which i would have paid for if they just organised it). They're fairly rare too- it was the succession of short term tenants who didn't even bother reporting issues, my flat ended up empty for a good while months until i needed to sell it, as tenants were too much hassle.

Bungo. I actually totally agree with you with regard to council tenancies. It was a much better and fairer system. Anyone who can afford to buy their own home would do well to buy, not rent. That is what dh (then dp) and I did as soon as we could. Rent money is indeed dead money.

The great sell off of the council houses by the Maggie government was Imo actually an excellent idea. It gave tenants the ability to own the houses, they already considered theirs at a reduced price. The stock sold off was those larger than average sized houses in today's building terms with large gardens requiring a lot of maintenance. It also made sense from a financial standpoint for the government. The downfall is that Maggie refused to reinvest the money in new housing stock with less land and a smaller footprint. The money stayed in the coffers only to be slowly eaten away.

The government now cannot afford to renationalise great swathes of housing. There are systems in place in other counties, such as France and Switzerland where there are HLM's. These are governmental controlled private company contracted building projects of low rent housing - mainly or perhaps exclusively apartment blocks. They account for 16% of buildings in France and it is relatively easy to access an HLM. This system or similar should have been implemented in this country with the sell off from the housing stock. Sadly it was not.

In a utopia, yes, everyone would own their home and dh and I would not have our few rentals. That's fine, we would invest our money elsewhere and if we had a system similar to that in Germany, maybe in the shares of companies owning low rent housing or maybe something else. You sound as though youve been around the block a bit as well. This argument has been polarised recently since the price hike. House prices went very low in the 1996 crash and then again low, but not halved in the 2008 crash. Private landlords are not solely responsible for the increase in house prices. We've had ours since around 1999. The house boom in London was sparked a lot by super rich foreigners and money laundering. Moreover, house prices wax and wane 1996 and 2008 were not the only crashes and houses doubled in price in one year in the early 70's for example.

The article about this man is rather thoughtlessly written as though buying another house is like adding one more notch on his bed post and perhaps for him, it is or perhaps that is journalistic licence.

As a very small time landlords, dh and I are providing a service, which the government sadly cannot provide. I have explained my reasons behind this and they are to look after me, as an unwell person in my old age as I may always need the medicine I am taking. Who knows.

Just seen your post Micah. As I said in my post above, council properties were (and now once again under this current government continue to be sold off in smaller numbers) in the right to buy scheme. Post early 1980's Maggie sell off, some former tenants then promptly sold off their property and made a tidy profit by selling off at market rates. There was much public outrage when great swathes of people sold off their former council houses at the time of Maggie "selling the Crown Jewels" for peanuts. The quick selling of their now privately owned homes coupled with bank deregulation and much easier access to borrowing actually caused prices to rise.

We certainly need more house building in inner cities which have jobs for people. That will have to be building upwards in London due to land shortage. My son has just made an offer on a one bed in outer London. The state will fleece him of thousands for stamp duty and then he has all the other incidental fees of buying. It's a big risk. Buying and renting both come with pros and cons and people in both sectors and tenants and landlords will all have their own views.

However if you don't like renting then try to find a way to buy and encourage your children to if you can't, as they get older. In many parts of the country it is possible to buy if you are prepared to take the risk.

Bungowomble, our lease in Belgium is a 9 year, taken out in late 2013, so it's still a 3/6/9 here.

All of my tenants have had their deposits back (though I had £40 off one for the gouge in the laminate flooring), and the house had an awful lot of money spent on it between tenants.

specialsubject - the Shelter survey data is backed up by numerous other surveys, so it is ridiculous to claim that you object to the data because it is only a sample, without acknowledging that ALL the data points the same way.

(And no, anecdotes on MN of 'I am a great landlord because I say I am' are not data.)

Janecc - not clear how you being ill means that there isn't a problem with an iniquitous housing market. People who rent also get ill, but unlike you, they risk being turfed out onto the street with only two months notice. In fact, people who rent are more likely to get ill - because, as in the link I posted above, the poor condition of rented properties compared to owned properties means that the property itself is far more likely to make them sick. :( Plus the psychological stress of not being able to put down roots, and some very invasive landlords (eg regular checks of the property, such as the post above who described how the letting agent would critique their hoovering ) will also impact on health.

specialsubject - you really seem incapable of reading the data. Or applying common sense.

100% of properties suffer problems BUT when you own your home, you can choose to repair it (or if you choose not to, that's up to you). The difference is that if you're a tenant, you cannot just fix the problems but have to wait for the landlord to get round to doing it. And the truth is that many landlords don't fix problems within a reasonable length of time, to a reasonable standard, or in some cases, at all, compared to houses that are owner-occupied. The data is very clear on this - not clear why you are in denial about this. Is it out of a sense of guilt? Of entitlement?

I just don't get it.

If some of the landlords on here were honest and said 'I went in to BTL because I wanted to make lots of easy money so I'd have an easy life', at least that would be honest. Why the need to back it up with 'I'm just doing a public service', 'I'm the perfect landlord' (yes, sure you are ), 'My tenants all love me' , all rented properties are brilliantly maintained, and other such guff. It's patronising and untrue.

Maybe this explains the attitude of some landlords on this thread:

www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-boeskool/when-youre-accustomed-to-privilege_b_9460662.html

‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’

I'd be more jealous of those born into wealth rather than someone who got rich through work and investment.

Eh? Who is jealous of anyone on this thread? The issue is not jealousy, it's a disfunctional housing market.

Easy money. Yes, all those years of work , it was just handed over. And the easy money in btl is hilariously dumb. Put the guardian down, eh?

No, btl is not a public service. It is to make money like all other work is. Yes, my property is maintained well.

What do you do for a living that is so moral? Or do you refuse payment, in which case how do you eat?

Jealousy is for the stupid or infantile. Where does it get you?