Is a buy to let a status symbol in the UK?

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I can't quite understand why everyone I know who has a little spare cash on the side (I am 30 so people I know are generally in that age group) talks about buying a buy to let. Even in today's economic circumstances (high mortgage rates) and unfavourable tax conditions. I live in London so most people in my age group would be paying 40% tax if they got a BTL though I guess they would be buying it under a corporation. However, they don't have years and years of savings or equity so would presumably not be buying in cash..

It doesn't make any sense to me but I realized that fairly flashy people I know always talk about their BTLs so it got me thinking, is it a status symbol in the UK? I am not originally from the UK so I really didn't know. I understand it made sense for a lot of older people in the past to supplement their pension. I am from a country which prizes home ownership (89% home ownership) and own my flat too so I understand this drive to 'own' property and of course your own home. But in my country, I hardly hear perfectly ordinary and average people 'aspire' to be landlords. And from a financial perspective, it doesn't really make sense these days with all the regulation so the only way to explain the public's obsession with it is that it is emotional

My dad was always a landlord but he does it as a full time thing and mainly invests in commercial property and is more into the 'development' aspect. And he certainly doesn't think of it as a status symbol more like his career, and he has had a life long interest in property. He would not do it as a side hustle and certainly not if it was as regulated/taxed as it is here.

Lots of people who are dead against it would do it in a flash if they had the means imo and experience. I'm not sure why people are so against it other than envy

Younger people are against it because simply by being born later they often have to pay more in rent than they would on a mortgage.

Great idea in a country where the Tories manage to run everything into the ground within years! Have you ever considered a move to North Korea?

I think for older generations BTLs were seen as easy money. Easier to borrow, rising prices often meant big gains & its fair easier to understand than money markets or pensions.
It's defo not as profitable as it was though.

I'm not heavily invested in being seen as a good landlord. I don't know you or the posters on here and really couldn't care what you or they think of me.

l just find it ridiculous that all LLs are seen as 'evil', as has been stated in this thread.

It's a transaction, the landlord rents the property out, the tenant pays for that service. Sometimes certain services have to be terminated. If someone rents a house then they must accept that at some point the transaction may come to an end.

Many small landlords are selling now because they just can't manage to keep the properties in the rental market for whatever reason, one of those often being that tenants aren't paying their rent.

To get a tenant out through the courts takes around six month. The landlord still has to pay the mortgage even though no rent is being paid. Small landlords often can't sustain that amount of loss.

There are a huge number of tenants, I've had my fair share of them, that move into a perfectly decent house with decent landlord who then proceed to not pay any rent and leave the place wrecked.

There's a lot of bad landlords out there but equally there are a lot of bad tenants. Sometimes it's just not worth the landlords while to keep on renting out.

It’s more - seems like a safe investment as house prices have gone mad IMHO. That being said, I am starting to think people like this are wankers, as most of the ones I know who have gone down the landlord route are…

in my home country, singapore, the state builds the housing that 85% of Singaporeans live in. Its not North Korea, in fact its the opposite. We have 89% home ownership. Its sold to Singaporean citizens and permanent residents at a discounted rate. We actually inherited this housing system from the British and i guess at the start, it was quite similar to the council housing system. Unfortunately in the uk, it has become massively scaled back but in singapore it has expanded to the extent that 85% of the population live in it including the middle classes.

I do think that the way forward would be the state acquiring more housing to house the poor (as opposed to paying housing benefit to private landlords) but at the same time, we need to open it up to the middle classes so they have a vested interest. in singapore, even property developers like my father are supportive of the HDB project namely because he knows that it means that his children are practically guaranteed a property that they can afford and he doesn't need to give us any deposits. There are probably not many British parents of millennials who can say that they are sure that their children can afford to buy their own properties with zero help!

In fact, even if I never married or couldn't afford to buy a property in London (where I live), I would still be eligible to buy a government hdb flat in singapore as soon as I turned 35 which is only in 4 years. I can't buy it unless I sell my flat in London (and DH needs to get PR in Singapore or I need to buy it as a single in 4 years time) which I suppose is fair in the greater scheme of things.

Another one of your lazy stereotypes. Is the private school thread getting a bit boring?

No, have you? fyi i believe its hard to get a visa.

Plenty of perfectly normal western european countries have not put into private ownership the provision of housing for the least well off, have they Govts that voted down legislating to make rented housing habitable or have kids dying of mould related deaths.

We used to have a reasonably decent social housing sector, post war till the early 80s.

Yeah, but that's like saying "I'm not going to take this promotion with increased salary because I'll have to pay more tax."

Of course there are tax efficient ways of doing things, but that is true of any income. Also, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so although it might be tax efficient, it isn't tax free.

Dry your eyes

How nice. We own 2 buy to lets and would like to think we're good landlords. You might find it hard to believe, but we still exchange Christmas cards with several tenants.

Typical of the contempt many LLs hold their tenants in.

But well done for making this point so well.

So many attitudes towards BTL are from people in the South East. I'm a landlord in the North East. Up here you can buy a property for £45k. Generally speaking people have rented my property for a few years and then left to buy a property. We are selling up next year as new rules and a fixed rate mortgage ending mean we would have to put £400 a month in ourselves to cover the tax and additional mortgage payments. We told our tenants the other week (and gave them up to 12 months notice fwiw). They said everyone is pulling out of the rental market now and fortunately they are ready to buy. The new rules are addressing a problem that exists in London and not in other locations. There's also very little capital appreciation where I live! As a result right now for the first time ever there are no rental properties available in the immediate area on Rightmove. That is just crazy. I also work for a social landlord and we are expecting to take huge hits to our development programme due to costs of EPC by 2030 and carbon zero by 2050. It's the same across the country. The government has issued these targets but offered very little funding so far to assist. At a time when more social housing than ever is needed there is less being built.

Agreed, BTL is much more demonised in the south shed rents are extortionate and many people are wondering how their kids will ever be able to afford to rent here never mind own a place

Not for us it's an investment, it's the house next door to us, the same young family are tenants for the past 8 years, we took no deposit.

ichundich · 22/05/2023 11:10
Doagooddeed · 20/05/2023 15:44

Exactly, get some poor sod to buy you a house and a lifestyle and then make them homeless with just 2 months notice.

You sound lovely.
Show quote history
Blame the system not the landlords. In Germany section 466 of the civil code prevents landlords from kicking out tenants when they sell the property. It could easily be implemented here if there was a will.'

Ever heard of a moral compass? @ichundich BTL landords do get a bad rap, but comments like this are why... 'blame the system' okay then...

We had a small portfolio and sold them for this reason. Some were held in a company but that made them inflexible. The others just weren’t tax efficient.

@RedRosette2023 So a few more families uprooted because your portfolio wasn't tax efficient i.e didn't make you enough money.

This is exactly why the majority of rented accommodation should be operated by councils.

😂😂😂😂 landlords as slave traders! I suppose it’s a slight variation on Godwins Law.

You sound completely ridiculous

I wouldn’t really say it’s a status symbol, but rather a symptom of the fact that a lot of the British public doesn’t have the financial literacy to fully and accurately evaluate all of their investment options when they do have spare cash. The BTL business model is pretty easy to grasp, and if you are suspicious of ‘the markets’ and aren’t aware of all of the investment vehicles available to you, BTL probably seems like the most logical place to put spare money.

It is also how the Boomer generation generated their own extra streams of income. People who are looking to their parents for an example of how to invest and save for the future will see BTL as the obvious option if that’s what they’ve seen successfully modeled. They may not realize that it will be harder to replicate that success for themselves because of the in a different economic/tax climate we’re in today.

No just in the process of being evicted by a cunt of a LL who after over 20 years gave me 2 months notice, refused a few extra weeks, then put the rent up for the remaining notice period.

You sound like a landlord, even the name "...Lord" says it all.

I despair of this attitude. Loads of people are not in a position to get a mortgage and there's sod-all public housing left. Where are they supposed to live? We need good private (not slum) landlords to fill the gap.

So you had twenty years without moving and your landlord is a cunt. Yes, you sound very reasonable! Just out of interest had you wanted to move, how much notice would you have wanted to give your landlord?

I thought the BTL craze was over 15 years ago?

A colleague had one, bought as an investment but they soon realised how time consuming and expensive it was. Lost rent inbetween tenants, agency fees, costs for fittings which tenants broke etc.
Both worked full time and at least once a month we were told another horror story.

But, they didn't do their homework. Didn't plan the location properly and tried too much on their own.

They sold it around 3 years later, while the value did increase I am not sure how much they actually made if you take tax and costs into account.

We were tenants to a private landlord twice and I found the differences staggering. One was too laid back, wanted to do everything himself but couldn't be reached when needed. The other was via an agency and worked very well because the agency knew what they were doing.

So nothing against private landlords but I would not touch one without working through an agency or who is doing it as their actual business instead of renting out a house they inherited or bought as BTL.

err i 've had 20 years and they had their house paid for 4x over, whats your point?

Yes giving someone a S21 and week later a sect 13 rent increase is cunty behavior & you think thats reasonable! talk about getting ones pound of flesh.