Homes Under The Hammer Selfish Ruiners of EVERYTHING

[LNPW]

AIBU to really hate people on HUTH who buy beautiful Victorian family homes and turn them into scruffy flats set for a life of minging curtains and a million wheelie bins parked outside?

I know it makes financial sense to do this if you buy a big property but ffs ... leave the Victorian shit alone!

I watched one where they bought a gorgeous 5 bedroom Victorian terraced house. Huge original fireplaces, stain glass windows etc etc ... it needed a lot of work doing yes but the building itself was amazing.

“So, what are your plans for this gorgeous property”

“Well I’m gonna turn it into flats innit” fuck off

Not everyone who buys at auction and then rents out the properties are greedy, my ds owns a plumbing and building company and branched out a couple of years ago into property, he buys at auction mainly family homes, the properties he buys are unmortgable so he is not 'stealing ' homes from young first time buyers who would need a mortgage to buy, he has 4 at the moment all of his houses are in good areas and are nice family homes, he works in conjunction with the local council and his tenants are usually families who have been in temp accommodation or homeless, his rents are never above the rents the council and HAs charge for their rents , all his tenants are on some sort of benefits which a lot of LLs wont touch with a barge pole.

He also maintains his properties and in fact the last one just before lockdown was needed urgently for a homeless family and he and one of his staff spent all night laying carpets in all rooms so the house ready for them.

Definitely E mids is popular. I’m not a fan, tbh. It’s the same every time. Cheap renovations, beige DIY bulk buy interiors and the strange 80’s bouffants (Lucy’s is Bonnie Tyler & Martin’s is David Van Day). Lucy’s voice gets on my wick too. It’s just an all round nope for me.

As for converting the houses into HMOs and flats, they seem to do it in areas where there is an already high proportion of that type of housing. Council planning depts should be controlling the numbers of plans they approve in certain areas as some are just overrun. They are areas where I live which are full of student HMOs but is still family residential too. The families find it difficult with the term time noise and mess left by the students (it’s always in the local paper and the Facebook page) and find it difficult to sell their properties for a fair price when they want to move on. Meanwhile, (most of) the students go home in the holidays and when they graduate without the care in the world for their area and the landlords continue raking the £££ in.

Yep. I hate the 'that'll do' attitude to rental properties.

They buy a near-dump, do the structural issues and leave all the hideous antiquated kitchens and bathrooms in. Then one coat of magnolia, some cheap carpet and it's a 'dream home' for some poor sod to rent.

You don't have to use expensive fitments but you could appreciate it's going to be someone's home and decorate with a bit of care and thought.

I want to win the lottery...

Not totally relevant but it amazes me that insulation for warmth and against sound is not thought of when converting into flats (or even building new).

Ex dil lives in a posh area in Nth London in a ground floor purpose built 2 storey flat. Built in 1907. They are as if they are made of cardboard, You can hear the neighbours and even smell their cigarette smoke. !

I sympathise with the plight of people in rural areas being priced out by "townies" downsizing or buying second homes, but actually the people who have been most severely affected by booming house prices are Londoners. To rent a 3 bedroom house in my fairly average postcode is now something insane like £2500 or more per month. £900,000 to buy a 3 bed Victorian terrace. Young Londoners are screwed.

Of course the university and the students bring a lot of investment to the city too.

I hate it full stop. It legitimises the most disgusting greed. Most of the investors are buying small properties which families should have, but most younger people nowadays aren't even considered for mortgages.So it either becomes a social let with the state paying the rent, or a couple beggar themselves to pay rent on what in many cases is an ex-council property, and can't afford to save for a deposit. All wrong.

YABU in your attitude to tenants. We don't all have 'minging curtains'.

Just because we can't afford to buy because we're low waged doesn't mean we're dirty.

Unreasonable and a fucking snob.

I hate this programme so much!
I guess the fall out from the virus will be some places being cheaper and more people doing the ' buying a repossessed place and doing it up ' thing. Some Property developers are on to winner in a years time and will have the spare cash to do it.

A lot of these large Victorian houses that are converted into flats are because they are too big for one family with their 7 bedrooms and high ceilings and resulting power bills.

In the 70s a lot of them in the area I lived were flattened and blocks of flats put up in their place.
At least these people are keeping the places lived in.
The alternative would be to leave them to rot.

Oldsu It's nice to hear about your dh. ALL landlords should be forced by law to be the same.

Chic I know, it's almost impossible to buy anything even remotely pleasant within the M25 ring. For young people to get on the housing ladder.

I haven’t watched it that much (mainly watched it when on mat leave - it makes me think of breastfeeding!) and I haven’t seen a Victorian house into grubby flats travesty. Most of the ones I’ve seen involved someone buying a shockingly run-down crack den type house full of rubble and dead pigeons, and declaring they would spend 5k or some such doing it up for rental. £50K later they have a cheapo-looking 2-bed rental and a spivvy estate agent looks down his nose at it and says “I reckon this property can command a rental income of 20p a week” and the buyer has to pretend it was worth the bother.

Don't like it either - greedy

Seen my ds's awful student accommodation & rip off rents plus bathroom right next to kitchen which I thought was illegal

Well they do tend o focus very heavily on London and the South East

I havent watched for a while but I didnt find this at all, almost every episode I've seen had somewhere in derby, sheffield, harrogate or Plymouth.
I've lived and grown up in London and the SE and I am always amazed at how much cheaper the properties were to buy/rent elsewhere.

And yes to when they seem to be able to put a kitchen, bathroom, new boiler , new carpets and double glazing in for 10k!! Although all the kitchens and grey carpets look the same!

But - on the other. There is a shortage of decent housing and many people cannot get on the property ladder. So making one very large house for one person/family into smaller flats for multiple people / families seems right

This isn't often decent housing though, and often it has a negative impact on the surrounding area.
HMO and conversions to flats made our and other families lives miserable in our previous home.
In my experience the developers rarely have any consideration for anyone else with regard to sound proofing, parking, paying for waste removal or even basic things like keeping on top of the gardens etc.

More affordable housing should be being purpose built instead of the luxury homes with bathrooms and dressing rooms shoehorned into every conceivable space.

@Oldsu those jobs your son does out of the goodness of his heart (cough) used to be by council employees on decent salaries with good pensions. The profits your son takes from the rentals used to go into schools etc. Lots of money is wasted by LA but still your son is reducing the amount already in a limited pot so we won’t be thanking him come the revolution I’m afraid.

Oh and I agree about the dodgy greed of it all and how it encourages BTL. Some of the most Marxist people I knew in my youth now smugly own multiple properties and don’t have a worry in the world about it - and an amazing number of people I know now turn out to have rented-out flats as well as their main property - it’s almost the norm for the middle-class.

The cheesy music they play amuses me. So if you have a house that looks better inside than out, they'll play 'don't judge a book by its cover' or something like that

YANBU. They rarely create well thought out homes.

I watched an episode years ago where someone was renovating to a standard and letting via a housing association (much below the market rate).

As an aside, I went to an auction they were filming at (one of the houses went on the programme but I was out of the way of the cameras for that on . It condenses what is an extrememly tedious process and all the strange people the room is filled with are not shown.

Sorry OP, that wasn't relevant to your post at all
YANBU though.

HATE

I think it depends a lot on where the property is. And actually, it's not the developer who is at fault so much as the planning department who give permission for inappropriate conversions.

There are a lot of properties featured in the East Midlands particularly Stoke. I am always amazed when a tarted up bed sit aka studio flat in London is valued at over half a million and watch open mouthed from the comfort of my 3 bedroom, 2 sitting room house with lovely view worth a quarter of that.

having lived in a victorian ruin terrace for some time I got a nervous twitch every time a builder said 'original to the house' with thst teeth sucking thing they do before giving you a quote, I'm all for ripping anything out that's dangerous (guillotine windows) and high maintenance (open gutters).