To think it's selfish to deliberately plan to rent out the old house when you buy a new

[jdoe8]

I understand why people do it, its dog eat dog out there and people look after number 1 even if it means it screws others.

But how are the next generation going to ever afford to buy if people carry on doing this?

This makes for depressing reading especially the comments - www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/26/the-sad-cost-of-renting-never-having-somewhere-to-call-home

I don't believe any generation worked any harder, you just had to be lucky and in the right place at the right time. Its very well to say just rent but renters have such poor rights in the UK it's very undesirable.

I think TheCuriousOwl has put what I was trying to say far more eloquently.
My point was that none of my friends own a house, or even rent for that matter, but that is out of personal choice. They have different priorities to me, which is fine, but they couldn't then turn around and blame the economy.

Your wording was ambiguous Dog, you said a 50% deposit which made it sound like you saves half the price of the house.

And a 20 minute drive is hardly a chore, many have to move hours away just to be able to rent.

makeourfuture Limits? Could you elaborate? I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.

Thank you CuriousOwl for managing to say what I was trying to say more eloquently. I find it so frustrating to read these threads when there seems to be a complete lack of acceptance that sometimes people renting is as a result of choices made at a different point in their lives.

dog 20mins drive is nothing! 20 mins from where I grew up is not going to help

Limits? Could you elaborate? I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.

Social responsibility. Are you willing to compromise?

Compromise? How so?

I don't think that a LL shouldn't receive a yield from their rental - quite the opposite, but it absolutely is my business as a renter to question the morals of LL's who own - whether outright or through repayments - a property, and charge £20k a year in rent for a 1 bed property just because it's sort of near a tube station. This puts renters in the never ending cycle of renting, as they haven't been gifted money to use as a deposit.

Well we are asking so much of the poor and disabled. For the good supposedly of the public interest.

The housing situation is too a matter of public interest. Can we ask landlords to pitch in too?

We kept our first home as a nest egg for DC. We had the deposit and affordability for a bigger home without selling our first home. We plan on selling it when DC are grown and the equity will be split between them so that they have decent deposits for their own places. I want my DC to have it easier than we had it. If that's selfish then so be it.

andnone surely a rental which can command £20k a year would be a property which would be worth a considerable sum on the sales market too?
Surely People can't expect to rent a property for £500pcm which would cost £400k to buy?

Don't see how this is selfish. Just don't.

You're being vague makeourfuture.

Are you saying that we shouldn't keep our other house to rent out but sell it instead? For the good of the housing situation? Could you be more specific?

Or as landlords we should be contributing more in other ways?

I don't have a problem with people letting out second properties. At least they are giving someone else a place to live. It would be much worse if the second properties were standing empty.

Well no actually, I said 'both putting 50% into the deposit' and if someone is ambiguous, then personally I would clarify things before being rude and then accusing someone of outright lying
I didn't say that me living 20 minutes away would help anyone's situation either, but I was specifically asked where I lived so I answered the question. The point was that if you
really want to get onto the housing ladder, you have to prioritise that and live somewhere else, whether it be 20 minutes away or 2 hours.

No six, but if a mortgage is £600 and a LL is charging £1600, then that's unfair. I do believe that BTL is one of the main reasons it is so hard for average - high earners to get into the property ladder. I don't at all pretend to have the answer to the issue but if (especially) London / SE renters are paying more than half their salaries i to rent then it's going to become more and more difficult for them to buy.

I rent out my old house. I see it as providing accommodation for someone who could not afford to live there otherwise. Right to buy is also a great idea, if it had been done in conjunction with building equal amounts of social housing. Which it hasn't. But don't worry op, it's only temporary, there'll be a property crash soon and then all the buy to let houses will get sold off cheaply.

In Europe renting is the norm; it is just over here that we have to have our "castle."

There are good/bad landlords and good/bad tenants.

A close relative of mine (who works very hard indeed) has chosen property as her pension investment and now rents out 3 properties. Her tenants are treated with fairness, friendliness and respect, and also understanding if they fall on hard times and get behind with the rent. She is an excellent landlord and fulfilling a local social need. I do not feel that she is doing anything immoral; far from it.

As to some of the tenants.....least said! Suffice to say a large amount of time over the last few months has been spent cleaning and renovating the mess left by one inconsiderate tenant.

We had to keep our flat because we couldn't sell it. We'd have lost tens of thousands of pounds. When we sold our house to buy this house, we checked the possibility of selling the flat again, and still couldn't. No one wants to buy a flat in a beautiful well maintained block, with a private pool and underground parking. The bloody thing costs us money every month, the rent only covers interest only and so we're building no equity to allow us to sell it cheaper, and we cover the service charge plus all maintenance costs ourselves. It is a millstone round our necks. It's not that we've overpriced it, it's just that they don't sell in our block due to the service charge. We can't afford to lose money so for the time being we keep our lovely tennants happy and cause them no trouble because if they left we really would struggle financially. It works both ways.

OP can't afford to do it so it's wrong? Hahah.

That's fair enough none but in the region that I live rentals are linked to house prices. So if the amount somebody would pay on a 25 year repayment mortgage was £600 (based on current prices) the rental On that property would be nowhere near £1600 and would probably be more in the region of £600 - £900. Which when you add buildings insurance, cyclical repairs and landlord insurance onto the mortgage cost the rental price is very comparable.
You only have to look at average yields to see that not many rents are vastly more than a repayment mortgage on a similar property would be. Of course some people skew these figures by taking out interest only mortgages but those people are really not buying the property unless they have a decent savings plan alongside the mortgage payments and then you need to add both sums together.

I don't mind people owning more than one property and becoming landlords, as long as they do their homework before putting it up for rent.

My issue is with amateur LL's who think the solution to their financial troubles/negative equity is to rent out their former homes without a clue about their legal responsibilities and with no money in the pot to sort out repairs. I could scream every time I've read that a LL can't afford to do a repair. If your paying for a service, you should get that service. Basic consumer rights.

Then there are the LL's, big and small, who don't consider certain repairs an issue e.g. Non working light sockets etc.
Not enough to get environmental health out but enough to get you evicted if you complain about it. If you pay full market rent then you should get a fully working house.

Yes you can move out, blah blah blah..... but you could be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. You could end up with a worse LL in the next property. That's even if there is a suitable property available once you been served notice.

It's slim pickings in the rental market.

I'll also add that I would be more than happy to undertake/pay for certain repairs/maintenance of the property in exchange for a longer term tenancy and the option of hanging a fucking picture up and owning a dog.

Those kinds of LL's are as rare as hens teeth

I rented a house out for a short time. It was never planned but the sale fell through so we rented it out and was prepare to let the tenant stay for as long as they liked. The house was decent - I had lived there myself. I was happy to carry out repairs in a timely manner but when you have a tenant ripping kitchen cupboards off the walls, venting a tumble dryer into the house and allowing her dog to damage all the doors and flooring and then complaining about that damage it does make you reluctant to rush around and sort it out as those things are not problems with the actual property. I didn't stay a landlord long as I sold the property to a professional landlord to save myself the hassle and cost of eviction.
It's tenants like the one I had that make landlords reluctant to accept pets.

You had the option of evicting her and claiming damage from the deposit/small claims court though six

Yes, the process should be quicker for people who deliberately damage the property, stop paying rent etc. I don't think anyone disputes that.

But for the situations like my post above, the is very little recourse a tenant can have. You're just expected to suck it up and move on to the next property and go through it all again. While paying ££££'s up front in fees