"In Europe most people rent"

[cheesyinkent]

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate

Why do people constantly say this when it's not true and the UK has one of the highest renting rates in Europe? France has a similar home ownership rate and renters over there have way more rights.

Two things annoy me about the presentation of the German rental model as the ideal:

1. Long term rental contracts don't provide all of the advantages of ownership. The obvious one being that if you own, you have an asset which you can use to raise capital if you need it. You can also usually pay off the mortgage before retirement. If you rent, you have no such asset and you have to continue paying rent through retirement. Having installed your own kitchen and security of tenure doesn't make up for that.

1. My understanding is that it's really hard in countries that do the long-term rental thing for people to get short-term rental contracts and, in general, to rent without a lot of capital saved up. Not everyone who rents wants a long term contract.

We rent in Belgium....and are l/ls in the UK. Everything we pay for as landlords in the UK, we pay for as tenants in Belgium, so buildings insurance, boiler servicing, the gardener, water softener servicing, chimney sweeping. There is no wear and tear here, so the property has to be given back in the same condition as when it was first rented. You are lucky to walk away with less than a €2000 charge here.

I agree with you OP. It also frustrates me when (mostly landlords) suggest that most people don't want long term tenancies.
Just under 40% of families with dc rent now and they do want long term tenancies.

It was usually said by smug home owners. We own now but moved ten times in eight years due to the landlord selling up.

Completely different housing models.

We rent, but I absolutely do not agree that tenants should be allowed to stay in a place as long as they like.

At the end of the day, it may be their home, but it is not their property, and it is up to the people who own the property to do what they like with it.

There are a lot of bad tenants around; it wouldn't be fair for a landlord to have to be saddled with them and have to go through even more rigorous procedures than they do now to have to evict someone.

I'm really quite happy with the tenant rights we have in the UK, and again, I say that as a renter myself.

Is it too awful for me to suggest that you don't really rent?

I have never heard of a tenant calling for more support for landlords in this way.

I definitely think that tenants get more of a rough ride in the UK. They can be out on their ear in two months. All the talk of it taking up to a year is a huge exaggeration, usually the result of incorrect dates on the legal forms.

At most it will be six months and usually less with accelerated possession.

There really wouldn't need to be a huge task force on unsafe rental properties if it was all so brilliant here.

This was usually trotted out by people trying to imply that only Britain was a hotbed of self-interested capitalism while everywhere else was a socialist utopia.

I do think the UK housing system 'has issues', but I think those issues reside partly in the fetishisation of home ownership rather than in the fact that ownership is getting more difficult for people.

We're in Germany and choose to rent, partly for fear of struggling to sell if we decide we want to move - we have had to move around a lot for jobs but are settled in one place now, but are considering another specific move in about a decade's time. If people buy here it tends to be for life.

Mumoftwo I live in Germany - children do not learn pencil grip before turning 3, in fact in traditional parts of western Germany they are not in any form of child care at all until after their 3rd birthday.

There is no such thing as a 'short-term' or 'long-term' contract here, unless in a subletting arrangement. Contracts are time-unlimited, but tenants can always leave with three months' notice. I think that provides plenty flexibility enough, tbh.

Here, too, properties seem to stay in families. Having lived the last 6 years in small rural towns, I know a lot of people living in their parents' houses, often with their parents. There are advantages but also huge disadvantages to that. I also know people for whom selling their house has not provided the financial security it is supposed to, often because of less dynamic markets keeping prices down.

• not saying your neice hasn't learned that of course, but that it absolutely is not something typical.

Another problem with renting in the UK are the large and regular fees charged to both landlords and tenants by letting agents. massive upfront credit checking fees that are out of all proportion to what it actually costs and renewal fees when the tenant has lived there for years etc.

I don't know if this is similar in Europe? Someone upthread mentions wear and tear in Belgium but depending on how long you lived there, it sounds like it might not be an enormous amount per year - if you lived there 10 years it would be 200 euro per year? And you could plan for it.

If i say "most people in Germany rent" i am saying it as part of a discussion about the far better conditions for renters, or the fact buying isn't always the safety net people want to believe...

We rent in rural southern Germany and still live in the house we moved to when we first moved to Germany ten years ago. The (private) landlord has never set foot inside the house in that decade and doesn't show any interest in doing so, and we have never had a rent increase. If we have a problem we phone "his" handyman who comes straight away. In our experience most landlords in this area are actually from farming families who inherited large amounts of very expensive land and built a few houses on that land. Asking as you pay your rent they are very happy to let you treat the house as your own - why wouldn't they be, it's essentially free money for them!

Our land lord would have to give us 9 months notice to move out.

We could just scrape a 10% deposit together (house prices in our area are very high as we are comuting distance to the most expensive city in the country) and a house like the one we live in would cost about 350 thousand € - our rent is less than the payments on a 90% mortgage would be.

Most people rurally buy only once - they have (if they are lucky) a special building savings account and save to build their dream house, often in their late 30s or 40s when children are at school, definitely no expectation of owning before starting a family.

There is no concept of a "housing ladder" or a "starter home".

My husband's grandmother lived in the same rented city centre flat from before her second child was born until she died in her 90s, and this is perfectly normal.

The entire rental situation in the UK needs an overhaul and vastly better rights for tenants are needed.

It depends where you are in Germany. In the small village (about 2000 people in the 1960, now about 4000) in Northern Bavaria where I grew up home ownership is the norm, there are very few properties that are rented. Houses used to be mostly self-build with a lot of help from neighbours and friends. The house I grew up in was build by my grandparents and extended twice by my parents. It's different in cities but in more rural places home ownership is pretty standard even for working class families like mine.

Yes, the costs of buying a house are much higher in Europe (generally) than in the UK. In Belgium one pays approx 13%/15% of purchase price. And you get clobbered with capital gains tax if you sell in under five years. So it doesn't encourage flipping or buying "starter" homes from which you move on after a few yrs.

Most people who buy therefore are in it for the long term, when they are settled, so typically, if you are in long term education until about the age of 24/25 yrs, then you get married and rent and save up, then maybe have one or two DC, then you finally buy at the age of 30-35 yrs and don't move for a long time!

And, as others have said, many properties don't come up on the open market because they are handed down through families.

So perhaps this is why there is more emphasis on renting - not because people don't eventually buy - but when they do, it is usually just once or twice, unlike the average Brit who buys and moves many more times in their lifetime. So there isn't the same emphasis on buying if that makes sense, and as others have said, it's much more culturally acceptable to rent long term too.

Dh and I rented houses from private landlords in Germany, France and Belgium (i.e. Not companies or pension funds). So it isn't just pension companies, which own housing stock. I understood from my students (I taught English to adults) that plenty of Germans own shares in large housing companies. The shareholders are therefore landlords once removed.

I agree that the rental market needs overhauling in the U.K. Tenants need more rights to stay longer term. But in this case, landlords would need more rights to seize rent when tenants stop paying.

However, as other posters have pointed out, tenants have a lot of responsibilities on properties abroad they don't have in the U.K. Landlords pay for everything and it simply isn't the case abroad. Neither is fair wear and tear a concept in the same way as it is here. The dishwasher breaks. The tenant replaces. The walls have marks on it. The tenant pays to repaint it. Etc etc.

In Italy, and recognise aweewhilelonger's description as applying very much to here too.

We rent, and despite both being in good jobs will probably never be in a position to buy a permanent home here on our salaries and savings- because you are expected to stump up a massive part of the full price at the outset. Many people I know, and hopefully I will soon be in a position to do the same- rent the houses they live in all year round, and buy a small holiday home (coast/mountains/countryside) which nobody would dream of living in all year round, unless they were expats with dreamy notions of treading grapes and renovating old tumbledown villas.

Rents are fairly reasonable (though we are in the south, so that needs factoring in) and if you get an above board landlord (much harder to come by than in the UK where everything is very regulated in comparison) and once you are in, they can't evict you for 4 yrs, and then it has to be done on a 6mths notice thing. Long term tenancies are the norm.

It is true that properties stay within families- you find whole generations living on the same landing, and those houses will be passed on.

The statistics are of course skewed, in that, as someone upthread said, all us renters are renting from owners, so there are owners for each house/flat, they just aren't owner-occupiers. I would also venture that, certainly as far as Italy is concerned stats are also skewed because nobody puts their name to 2 properties or they are hammered for taxes, electricity etc costs more for your second home. So one property will be in daughter's name, yet the true owners will be the parents who actually live there, but who are down as renters etc etc.

..and definitely yes, once you are in the property, it's all your responsibility. Wear and tear, changing the boiler, whatever, it's the tenant's job. And frankly, why shouldn't it be? I'm always bemused when my cousin who is a LL tells me about having to rush off to his tenants because they need a lightbulb changing. (ok exaggeration, but some of the things they ring him for are ludicrous)

And even if a lot of people do rent, somebody owns those homes!

Well, of course someone does! What a fatuous answer.

The point is, where lots of people rent, somebody owns lots and lots of other people's homes.

I was referring to someone else's "fatuous" comment upthread.

Fatuous? No. The proposition that most people rent in Europe is risible.

Barbara The problem is that you don't know what precisely you will be stung for when you leave. My friends who rent, think there is nothing quite so rapacious as a Belgian landlord....€12 per lightbulb for a friend last year, and she had some in the car, as some had popped overnight. Slight stain on the laminate, equalled the cost of a new floor!

My landlords are pretty good, as they have paid to replace the water heater under the kitchen sink. Mind you, this is their family home, whilst they work abroad, so we are in similar situations.

scary

Very true about the Belgian landlord. Dh and I rented twice. The first time was only for 6 months and dh was moved. The ll was inspecting walls - what's that? She asked. It was a rub mark where I'd cleaned a slight stain from the wall. I denied all knowledge and got away with it.

The second time, I went through the entire inventory. It took me 2 days to add and amend as I'd learnt from the first and heard horror stories. They accepted my observations. The inventory was done by two lawyers btw!! We managed to leave that property with with basically a fine for painting one wall. How?? When I painted the entire property top to bottom. This was all because I'd touched up a couple of marks and the paint didn't quite match when before it was an unsightly mustard yellow and there somehow was a bracket missing off a shower, which was used a couple of times. But I couldn't prove the bracket wasn't there at check in. Oh and the 6 yr old CREAM carpets had a few stains. All of this would have been fair wear and tear in the uk. Not to mentionwhen we left before 3 years of the rental agreement were up (we had a 9 year lease) there was an additional 3 MONTHS "fine" to pay and in which time we weren't allowed to live there but new tenants could move in.

So yeh it's soooooo much better abroad .

Peonyfan I really wish it was the case that we didn't rent, but unfortunately we do. Won't be able to buy for a few years yet, it seems.

When we were looking to move in together, we couldn't afford to rent. We didn't have the deposit and months rent in advance, so we had to buy. We got a 110% mortgage back then, so arguably buying was easier than renting. That house more than tripled in value and we were able to move up the ladder.

I feel incredibly saddened that my DC will not be able to buy without huge cash injections, the way we did.

It seems very very unfair.

Grace that is insane!