Greed of ‘buy to let’

[LittleLottieChaos]

When did people start to think that they should profit from housing? It all feels incredibly Dickensian. Pees me off when I see housing being listed as buy to let investments rather than ‘here’s a house for a nice young family to live in’. Especially with the market so horribly skewed right now.

It is shocking that people seem to think they have a right to profiteer from those less fortunate by whacking on high rents, that more than cover their mortgages. Legit: you need one house, one house only. Or maybe I’m missing something... or these are genuinely just bad people.

Interested to hear how people justify it? Do you just think, fuck ‘em I want to be rich? Do you not think about the morality?

(I rent but am saving to buy an appropriate house to live in... not to profiteer from)

@Scottsy100

Why be bitter about people who have the means to do this though? Ultimately they are often only trying to do the best by their own family or be able to leave something behind to warrant a lifetime of hard work and accomplishment. Sounds just like a touch of the green eyed monster to me to be honest.

Sounds like entrenching inequality to me...

@LadyWhistledownsQuill in Scotland flats are nicer & bigger & they don’t rip off people with ‘leasehold’ - how do you own it, aren’t you just renting it for 99 years? There are people trapped in leaseholds getting completely scammed with maintenance fees - jumping from £500 to thousands per year, just to sweep the corridor!
In US I could buy a house & they give mortgages to people with 0 credit, I don’t know if they’re building another bubble?

@LadyWhistledownsQuill before she died, my mother said she would go to Portugal or Greece if she was young, I could have a cow & chicken farm maybe. I used to take care of animals when I was growing up so I have experience. I’m also trying to find a course to qualify for some kind of different career but it’s overwhelming, I think I have adhd as well as autism. I hope in the future to have a job that allows me to access private psychiatrists & healthcare

Thank you @Xenia I will check if there’s waking night care jobs in those areas, I am trying to find a course to qualify for something else but it’s overwhelming, how do you do this? I never finished high school cause my mom moved us from Eastern Europe to Africa when I was a 13 & then became psychotic & diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia... Not sure what course or job I should train for, but now I am limited to where the care jobs are. It would be good to be able to work from home, I saw a hypnotist course, do people use hypnosis?

@jasjas1973 absolutely, MPs are mostly landlords & it’s a conflict of interest

There is a place for rental homes but it has got massively out of hand. First time buyers can no longer get on ladder.

I'm willing to bet many of those who have the power to change things have extra properties.

@Bythemillpond I’m willing to move but it’s not about whether I can get the house I want, it’s about having to be in a place where I can walk to work, it has to be a short walk as I’m disabled

@WaverleyPirate so I’m not the only one seeing the conflict of interest 😣

Massive conflict of interest.

The politicians keep trying to solve the problem by tinkering at the edges with measures which inflate house prices even more, rather than addressing the structural set up of housing market.

I own 2 properties.both paid for in cash with no mortgages, nothing fancy but the bank pays next to no interest on money in my account so we would be stupid to just leave the money there for afew pence worth of interest each year.i have these properties as I always have had my own small business with my husband and these homes are our retirement.i dont feel we stopped anyone getting the properties especially the first one, it was on the market for 2 years after the previous elderly owner passed away.

@mrsbrightside1308

I own 2 properties.both paid for in cash with no mortgages, nothing fancy but the bank pays next to no interest on money in my account so we would be stupid to just leave the money there for afew pence worth of interest each year.i have these properties as I always have had my own small business with my husband and these homes are our retirement.i dont feel we stopped anyone getting the properties especially the first one, it was on the market for 2 years after the previous elderly owner passed away.

I think it is sensible to plan for your retirement.

There are good landlords and bad ones. We need to exist to a certain point because not everyone wants to buy.

Automatic, that sounds very hard. There are definitely over night care jobs in the Sunderland area. My father who died in Newcastle where I was brought up had a team of 10 carers one or two of which did night shifts who were paid about £10 an hour in his last year when he had dementia but lived at home. He spent the last of his life savings on that care in his last year.

Hypnosis would be harder because of the need to build up a reputation and get the qualifications and you would probably have to travel to the customers. Work done from home - try peopleperhour - you can big for work on that. My student son has also done taskrabbit (and out of the home Uber eats and Deliveroo). (I have worked from hme as a lawyer since 1994 BUT I had to do GCSEs, A levels, a law degree, a year of law school, 2 years training in an office just to qualify and after that a lot of years commuting to get experience to be good at it before I could set up; although if that did attract you longer term the new SQE exams which start this year for solicitors can be self taught at home but you need a first degree in any subject first.

Anyway good luck. Most of my family back to the 1700s always rented and did fine. I did find one who owned - a yeoman which means in part he was a property owner and one mining one in the 1800s who on one census put "proprietor of houses" one year so even then the 1850s he was proud he had bought a couple of houses to let out. Most of the rest of them were tenants in the days when 90% of people in the Uk were tenants. God, family and love were probably what kept them happy in those days despite difficult lives.

I haven’t read the 34 pages of comments. But I think you are being a bit unreasonable op. Who do you have a problem with? The agents for the way they describe a property or a landlord for buying it?
Lots of people have a second property for pension reasons (rather than invest the stock market). Not to make loads of money, but so they are less reliant on the state in their old age.
I had a rental property for a while - when I moved in with now DH. I didn’t make loads of money out of it. But it did see me through a period of unemployment after being made redundant after being on maternity leave. That meant I did need to claim from the state. And I certainly wasn’t ‘taking a home’ away from anyone. The people who rented couldn't afford to buy. (I even offered it to them and they declined).
Others do it as there way of living. That’s their job. They make a living out of renting 5 (or whatever) properties. Better than them earning no money and claiming off the state!

Typo above. Renting my property meant I DIDN'T need to claim from the state.

@AutomaticMoon just so it's clear: @Scottsy100 says people with a BTL "ultimately...are often only trying to do the best by their own family or be able to leave something behind to warrant a lifetime of hard work and accomplishment."

You say that's "structural violence".

But the fifty thousand pounds your mother worked hard to save and passed on to you on her death is not privilege? That's not entrenching inequality. That's different. That's not "structural violence" because it benefits you this time. You take take take, but when other people have a bit of hustle you begrudge them it.

Can you hear yourself there in your echo chamber?

What special kind of carers job do you do that can only be done in coastal villages?

I haven't read all the pages so sorry if this has been mentioned before.

Firstly, whenI tried selling my 1 bed flat in January, after my tenants moved out, the only viewings I had were from "investors" it's in a cheap area it was under £100k and yet no private individual/young couple view it. It wasn't overpriced in fact I was selling it cheaply as I wanted to offload it. I ended up keeping it as the offers from other investors were stupidly low ie £30k below asking price.

Secondly, now for the big elephant in the room - immigration. As a btl landlord FOM was/is fantastic for me the majority of my tenants are Polish/Romanian. I offer them a very comfortable home as I live by the adage - would I live there myself? The answer always has to be yes. In fact their homes are decorated/repaired/maintained a lot more often than my own as their property always takes precedence.

So whilst I've benefited hugely from Immigration re: rent and a huge increase in property prices I can also see the massive downfalls too as 2.2 extra million people living in the UK is bound to affect the demand/supply on housing in the UK; yes I throw my hands up and acknowledge I am part of the problem. So what's the solution? Sell off my btl for other investors to buy?

A Polish person cannot enter the UK and instantly buy a house unless they're paying cash, so they need to rent. I rarely put the rent up because I'm not greedy.

I rented a house in London to a Romanian family for 10 years and they had 2 small rent increments. The rent was already £500 below market rent. The reason I didn't charge them market rent was because I knew they probably couldn't afford it; they had children in local schools and if I increased the rent they would have had to have moved a few miles outside the area as there wouldn't have been anything of a similar rent in the area. Not even a 2 bed flat. As a landlord/investor/property owner I feel I have a social obligation to my tenants and don't want my tenants with children to have to move out of their area causing a huge upheaval in their lives.

And lastly, something I've noticed on MN; whenever someone is thinking about moving to a new area the advice is always to rent first to see whether they like the area...

Sorry this was longer than intended.

Maybe you fail to remember that these people are also the same people that will be paying for their own care in old age rather than having it paid for by the government just because they had the drive and foresight to try and do better and leave something behind for their family, just incase you wanted to carry on droning about “entrenching equality” 🙄

@LadyWhistledownsQuill
Maybe you fail to remember that these people are also the same people that will be paying for their own care in old age rather than having it paid for by the government just because they had the drive and foresight to try and do better and leave something behind for their family, just incase you wanted to carry on droning about “entrenching equality” 🙄

@Lykia that's a good point (re renting initially when moving to a new area).

But posters have said yes there is a need for rentals but it’s got out of hand and ftb cannot buy a home in this country.

We are financially well off and could afford several btl. But it doesn’t feel right to me.

@Lykia You must know you are the exception that proves the rule? You are an extremely rare kind of landlord (landlady?) if what you’re describing is true. It would be excellent if all landlords were like you, but it’s very rare. I have had friends over the years who had great landlords, who operated like you do, but it’s the exception. It has become an exploitative, artificially inflated, bloated monster of an industry. The new builds in the uk barely meet the minimum size standards. Renters in this country are treated like second class citizens, in Europe tenants have more rights, for example in Germany, many people are happy to rent throughout their whole lives because renting doesn’t mean a lower quality of life, as it usually does here.

ClarkeGriffin: Not sure how you can find yourself as an 'accidental' landlord either. If you inherit a house, sell it. Don't need to rent it. You are choosing to. That's not an accident.
.......
What you mean is 'Don't need to let it'. It's the tenant that rents.

What happens if a place doesn't sell, do you just leave it empty, paying bills? It makes sense to let if only on a six month contract.

@Maggiesfarm Please don’t feel guilty, of course it’s fine to rent it while waiting to sell. If you’re a good landlady, more power to you (well, not really 😛) we are just frustrated because of the massive power differential & the corruption at large.
There is a big crisis in housing & glaring conflict of interest is at the heart of the problem. Many new builds are just the worst standard ever & the leasehold scam is ongoing... in Scotland I see they don’t do the leasehold scam, flats look bigger & better built & insulated & you actually own it, not just for 99 or 60 years