Housing Crisis solutions

[Aslockton]

I watched the Tonight programme last night which seemed to suggest the rise of 2nd home owners and airbnb is causing the lack of housing.

What's the solution? If I were in change...

1. Prevent Landlords increasing rents by more that 2% a year (straight away)
2. Tax all rental profits at 40% (starting next year)
3. Rise stamp duty on non-primary residence purchases to 20% (straight away)
4. Double council tax on 2nd homes and airbnb (straight away)
5. Waive capital gains tax on all second property sales for 2 years. (This will encourage 2nd home owners and landlords to sell up)
6. Make it law that tenants have to be offered the home first (if landlords sell) and the price will be determined by an independent adjudicator (like lease sales are).

Are these ideas unreasonable/ bonkers or both!!
If I had a second home, I would be tempted to sell up.

Same as @Allthegoodnamesarechosen

Completely agree with number 2. My ex mils mother owned numerous rental properties on the Wirral and in seaside towns in north wales.

She had a huge property portfolio when she died which was passed to MILs sister (that's another story) they've all been turned into holiday lets. Vile

What would you do about the hundreds of thousands of families who’d be evicted because of this?

if there was a real step change in our family living model and we still lived in multi generation households instead of individual households -I wonder if we will see a return to this way of living in the future

also , councils should buy back ex LA homes - got to be cheaper than building new

Agree with 1. I have a relative who saw his rent increase from £600pm to £850pm in one go. That can not be right, or even allowed.

In my opinion, things really started to go to shit when the Thatcher government introduced right-to-buy and effectively ended large-scale council owned and operated social housing. So for me the answer is to find ways to bring that back. You don't need to target private landlords in their many guises with fees and taxes. All that will do is force them to raise their rents and the tenants will end up paying. There will always be people who don't have the option to buy. Unless you provide a viable and affordable alternative to private rents then commercial landlords will control the market.

As an aside, I don't believe right-to-buy was ever meant to be for the good of the working classes. It was introduced at the height of Thatcher's battle with the unions and I believe her logic was that a worker with a mortgage and the risk of repossession was far less likely to strike than a worker living in a home rented from invariable a labour-run council.

Why not?

A £150pm increase is an absurd amount. Would you put up with that?

Sorry, that is £250. Maths failure.

Given how small either amount is it’s really not enough to be concerned about. So yes, if my rent went from ludicrously cheap to just very cheap I’d be fine with it.

My tenants are paying £5,000 per month, an amount that’s not gone up in years, but if after a few years the market rate has none up by 30% then of course it’s reasonable to increase in line with that.

Rents often work this way, sitting static for multiple years and then jumping back in line with the market.

£5000 a month? So your tenants are not ones on little more than minimum wage.

Someone on MW would be very concerned about a £250pm increase.

No, they are on a few hundred thousand pounds per year.

The wages of the tenants should have absolutely no impact on the level of rent being charged, of course. We don’t base the amount that people pay for clothes, food, or electricity on their income, and rent works in exactly the same way.

Of course, everyone who rents is on £100k a year. Maybe in your world. Meanwhile in the real one.....

Are you living on a different planet or just at the wind up? Even if you really are the owner of property that rents out for £5000 pcm you can't be so detached from reality (or basic arithmetic) to realise that £850 a month is not "very cheap" for the vast majority of the population, given average salaries and the number of people on NMW.

What’s that got to do with the price of fish? Or houses? You can say you don’t want to put up with something, but not sure your dislike counts for much.

Prices don’t stay static because you don’t like them to increase. It’s a case of supply and demand. If you want lower prices of anything, you need to increase supply.

What are you talking about? No-one’s made such a stupid claim.

Even if a couple are both on minimum wage, that’s still the best part of £40,000 per year between them. If the can’t afford £650 per month rent out of that then they need to learn to budget better. It’s certainly not an argument for capping rents.

Again, why do you think it right that rent should be based on someone’s earnings?

If I can rent a flat out for £1,000 per month, why would I instead choose to rent it to someone who can’t pay that much, rathe pr than the family who can?

Of course it is. £650 per month to rent a home is very cheap. It’s affordable even for a single adult on minimum wage.

The average monthly rent in the UK is around £1,100 per year. 650 is well below the average, and so clearly can be viewed as very cheap.

And where are all the renters going to live if landlords sell up? It would create another crisis, not solve it.

I get your point about second homes/holiday lets. These are a big problem.

You can’t keep punishing landlords. They enable some
to have a home to live in that they would not otherwise be able to buy.

We need to match these two figures up there is no point building houses they need to be built in the right places clearly

You can’t keep punishing landlords. They enable some
to have a home to live in that they would not otherwise be able to buy.

No they don't, not really. They are stopping the government from taking responsibility. We need more council housing not more private lets.

There is no housing crisis. There is an immigration crisis.

Decades of uncontrolled mass immigration are the root cause of this situation. Millions of people were led to believe that this would change when they voted for Brexit. They were lied to. EU migration has largely been replaced by legal migration from India & China, plus illegal migration from African & Middle Eastern countries. Overall net migration to the U.K. is just as high now as it was before Brexit. When people realise that they have been betrayed by the same politicians they trusted to ‘take back control of our borders’, further political upheaval is inevitable.

Look at the responses on here though when it’s suggested to someone that moving to the North East is a better option than seeing their children made homeless.

Unfortunately people often seem to think that they have a right to be given a nice home, where they want, irrespective of their ability to pay for it.

If I just walk 15 mins in any direction from my home, there are literally 100s of new homes being built. That is being echoed all over the country.

there's no shortage of house building. There's an issue with population and prices.

I was absolutely disgusted to find out that my student daughter was renting accommodation that we were led to believe for student flats, turns out they were available to the local community as well. Being basically bedsits you can imagine the clientele.

so I really don’t feel like that’s a fair solution but I do agree there’s enough of them now no need to build any more.

as for taxing the landlord 40% profit I agree with that 100% currently the situation is that they’re taxed at 40% of the net total collect it in rent which is totally unreasonable and is what’s causing a lot of the issues I believe there’s eight people going for every rental available these days and only 50% of the rental stock that was available at the beginning of 2019 so that’s where the bottleneck is.

There’s a housing estate going up not too far from us but it is very isolated but you couldn’t walk to the shops, or schooling locally.

and yet these houses sell faster than you can view them. £350-500,000 boxes