Rent increase - fuck fuckity fuck!!!

[BlondeWaves]

Moved into my house 2.5 months ago and now having to move as had a letter from the landlord to say rent is going up by 150 a month. I KNOW I am being unreasonable but I am sat here sobbing because I've just settled here with my young child and the thought of having to go through all that upheaval again is so stressful. I can't afford the extra 150, I'm already stretched with the way everything has increased. This could happen again and again and I just hate our government and the way things are at the moment. I have no resentment towards my landlord as I know his mortgage has realistically gone up by more than 150 a month, but fuck, I'm so stressed. Don't even know what I want from this thread, maybe a handhold, maybe to be told I need to suck it up (weirdly I respond well to tough love) but I need something. Anyone there? 😭

Vera

You cannot seriously believe that any Party bonkers enough to have your idea as one of their policies would have a hope in hell of ever being voted into Government. Dreamt up is right.

Council housing costs the govt little or nothing

Where do they get all these free houses?

I do think it's appalling a landlord has put up the rent after a few months and I say this as a landlord. I just had to put rents up for the first time in 10 years and felt really bad about that, and I put them up about 3%.

For people who say landlords should stress test mortgages - we do/did. For people like me, I did not foresee having flats with cladding issues that can't be remortgaged as they are worthless so I'm stuck on SVR mortgages for all of them. Also, due to the cladding/fire safety issues, service charges have doubled over the last few years so it's not just mortgages that have gone up.

I now have a property I'm subsidising for £300 a month and rising but I'm not pushing the burden on the tenant, it's not their fault. I will just suck it up.

Landlords are taxed as individuals not businesses but we are expected to operate like a business. After allowing for tax, my properties cost me money, they make none.

(I didn't choose to be a landlord and would love to get out of it before anyone has a go at me, but I can't sell the damn properties)

Check out how many social housing and below market rent properties have been built in Scotland since devolution. It can be done in an affordable way. Clue: most of them in expensive areas like Edinburgh are in mixed developments with the full price properties being used to subsidise the social housing.

But Scotland has a left wing political consensus which makes these big, long term programs easier to achieve. (And enough brownfield land thanks to Thatcher's brutal deindustrialization.)

So nowhere else but the UK is suffering from increases in rental and property costs?

www.wired.co.uk/article/housing-crisis-rental-idea

Looks pretty global to me.

We don't just need a massive uptick in house building, we also need to look at limiting the population growth.

Great minds and all that .....

www.landlordzone.co.uk/news/latest-leading-peer-calls-for-government-to-turn-private-rented-homes-into-social-housing/

Have you approached the council to see if they would buy it, I’ve heard this is can be done but don’t know the details.

Clearly that's the wrong quote!! I was trying to respond to a PP who said that building Council housing is hugely expensive and would require a massive repriotritisation of public funds.

Apologies then, I’d misunderstood.

I agree, there should be state-supplied housing for the lowest earners, and private landlords for those who have a preference to rent further up the price scale.

I don’t get the point of pretending building houses is low cost.

My preference when I rented in 20s was to pay market rate and not hike taxes to build a SH, I didn’t need it.

I needed a supply of private before buying

I think a lot of people are stuck seeing their own box - that they want to buy and are stuck renting - and can't see others are in different places.

They forget about many care home places funded by renting out old family homes - people using rentals as pension supplements - or people who aren't in position to buy like students - there have been media stories of student in Scotland and Durham I think commenting long distances or giving up course as there aren't enough student properties to rent. DH and I in our 20s had to moving round UK for work and study much easier and possible when renting - we weren't looking to buy and couldn't live with family so needed private rentals.

I've seen similar with house selling having a price we couldn't afford to sell under was apparently price gouging.

As it was we were writing of thousands (30 K+) in basic work not picked up with survey and selling under price we paid for it needing to get a minimum the amount of deposit for next house - only possible because we'd paid repayment mortgage for years - it had taken ten plus years pre kids to save that up and we had no hope to do so again. We'd bought just at a market high 2007 due to schooling age getting close but swallowed the losses and did our sums and found we needed to sell but get next house deposit or were better of staying where we were and DH continuing to live away pay weekly rent and travel back costs. Didn't matter we were evil profiteers and a huge reason hard working MNeers couldn't buy houses .

I really feel for you. I think that your best option is to try and negotiate with the landlord.

Vera

I need to go out, will read your attachment when I return.

The normal way - taxation and borrowing. Our governments were quite happy to increase borrowing to try and patch up their monumental f&ck up and yet don't seem so keen when there's an opportunity to grow the economy and help people. Austerity has got us no where fast. Might be time to try something different.

One bright spark suggested landlords should sell their rental houses to allow people to own their own homes. I would love to know how you think people renting will suddenly find enough money for a deposit to buy. Why the fuck do you think they are renting in the first place?

I am renting right now (it is amazingly difficult to find places). I have the money for a large deposit.

As for those who think that the Government, left or right, is going to build thousands of homes for cheap rental - you're living in cloud cuckoo land.

Silly me, I thought that was what governments were for! I am a pretty laidback laissez-faire type person. But I do believe that we should have "governments" to provide basic needs for everybody in society, such as basic housing, access to food.

Otherwise, why have governments in the first place?

Contact all the housing people in your area - associations, charities and council and let them know you are effectively being made homeless with a small child as your landlord has upped the rent to a level you can't afford.

Meanwhile, tell him you can;t afford it and that the increase will amount to arrears which will make your child homeless as you have no means of finding the extra money due to rising food and utility costs.

I am so sorry for you. This must be so stressful.

How much though? What’s the tax effect

I don’t want more hikes tbh and I doubt there’s any more borrowing to be had atm either.

Borrowing just lands it on my dc and theirs

As for those who think that the Government, left or right, is going to build thousands of homes for cheap rental - you're living in cloud cuckoo land.

There's been a massive building program mixed housing estate - private and HA housing - program where my family live - Tory strong hold.

Housing demand in area have always been high - we couldn't afford to live there as housing costs are so high but they have massively increased HA housing recently. Not sure why it's happened but my family have benefited.

By removing taxes associated with private land lords, you are doubling down on the problem.

Have people not learned that with mass government intervention into the economic model that the west runs in, always ends in misery, high taxes, inefficient ouput, and funds being pulled from other 'less important' sectors.

As in "on going costs", should have made that clearer, sorry.

What is sane about paying 10s of billions in housing benefit each to give to LL's with no return on that money?

Thats just dead money.

Obviously, because of the stupid decision by both parties not to replace sold council housing, there would now be v substantial costs.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have many times more low rentals available to the many essential workers (& others) we need, so they can have a decent life on or nr MW ?

e.g. how many more carers etc would stay in their jobs if they didn't see 50 to 75% of take home pay go in rent?

What are landlords meant to do? Honestly, buying to let when an interest rate increase like this puts you in loss, is gambling. It seemed like a really solid bet over the last 10 years when interest rates have been incredibly low, historically speaking, but borrowing hundreds of thousands of pounds to gamble indirectly on the financial markets brought risks.

Yes it sucks, but I can't bring myself to feel devastated for the landlords who have been caught out (after pushing house prices up for the last 12 years). I do feel terrible for you, OP, who is having to bear the brunt of this, instead of being stably housed by the council because there are no council houses left.

I'm so sorry. It's completely shit.

It's a con and greed !! You have only lived there 2.5 months the landlord would have known when his mortgage was going to rise and should have given you more notice before you even took the tenancy . Our 5 year fix ends end of 2023 we will not put the rent up until that time, the only cost that has risen is the gas safety certificate. Our tenant has been in the property since 2020 we haven't increased the rent as we want them to stay. I think because we were also tenants once and hated our landlords greed..

Have people not learned that with mass government intervention into the economic model that the west runs in, always ends in misery, high taxes, inefficient output, and funds being pulled from other 'less important' sectors

No it doesn't at all.

Germany and Austria both run high tax high intervention economies and both far exceed the UK in GDP output, as do many other countries, another is France's (or any other EU hi tax) health service better or worse than the UK's ?

On housing, no one can say that privatising social housing has been a success.

We need both private and public, social capitalism if you like, otherwise we will go back to the Victorian model.

The tenants pay for them. A council house built in the 50s has been paid for several times over.