To not feel sorry for landlords?

[CuriouslyMinded]

Honestly, so many people seem to have Buy To Let mortgages that they can't really afford and I can't help but think that if the interest rates are making life that difficult that they're struggling to feed their kids or whatever the latest headline is, then they should just sell their extra properties. There are first time buyers are desperate to get on the ladder for one thing, and also tenants don't deserve to have their rent increased by cash strapped landlords, and no one really needs to own more than one home. It's just so greedy. I don't feel sorry for them at all. I do appreciate that tenants need somewhere to live and not everyone can afford to buy, but part of the reason it is so difficult to buy a home is because so many people have overstretched themselves to own multiple properties that they don't even take care of half the time. The whole system is flawed and awful. Rant over!

The rental market is a shitshow but I think you’ve oversimplified why rental costs are rising. It’s not just increased interest rates being passed on, it’s also scarcity, which is driven by all sorts of issues including NIMBYism and land banking.

You don’t have to feel sorry for landlords, but save your ire for the housing policymakers who have created and exacerbated the current tensions for over a generation. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I don't feel sorry for them either, and I am one! It's a business model, and it should benefit both sides.
None of my properties are first time buyer properties - landlords are not responsible for the state of the market.
But it's not greed - how can you say you know people need to rent... not everyone even wants to own a property. Students, people that don't want the responsibility, people who like to be able to move around, and yes people who can't afford it. In fact there needs to me more rentals, not less.

If every private landlord gave up their properties, there would be a truly massive rental problem - far above what it is now.

I'm not a landlord, but in the absence of social housing, they are needed.

Councils need to enforce standards though.

We need council housing built, end of

Landlords are selling in droves. Feel sorry for all the tenants who can't buy because "affordability" for renting is a very different number to "affordability" for a mortgage, and whose homes are currently being ripped out from underneath them because their landlords are selling up.

There are loads of two bedroom flats on the market where I live, landlords can't ditch them fast enough right now. Most are being sold with no onward chain, i.e. rentals where the tenancy won't continue after the sale.

Each of those flats was someone's home. And now they've got to find somewhere else to live at 2023 prices.

Landlord problems are tenant problems.

What we really need is to re-vision what it means to be housed, and move away completely from this feudal landlord/tenant situation so many are trapped in where the tenant must preserve and take care of the property at all costs (repairs aside) but contractually isn't even allowed to put up shelves or wallpaper in exchange for being treated as the landlord's personal bank account, but IDK what the new way of allocating homes needs to look like unless all homes are either owned or HA/social housing, which would mean HA/social landlords would need to buy up a lot more properties and relax their criteria to allow more people to rent from them.

What they should stop is hoilday let's & air b&bs. They're half the issue why rentals are hard to come by.

Nope.

Not everyone wants a long term rental, or a council house.

There are thousands of people who want to rent a decent, well-maintained house for six months or a year while they are students, working in a location for a fixed period, saving to buy a property etc etc.

The current legislation in Scotland which has put so much more "risk" onto the landlord and pretty much banned evicting people has meant a student accommodation shortage like we've never seen. Landlords are selling up because it's just not worth it any more. This is not increasing the supply of rental properties, and the people who want to rent can't because there are no properties TO rent.

MN loves to demonise the evil, scummy landlords who are exploiting the poor, hard done by renters.

I have two properties I rent out, I feel sorry for all the people who can’t afford to buy. One property I rent to my DC for just under half the market rate. The other property was in the market for 9 months, it didn’t sell so I decided to rent it out as I didn’t want to have it left empty. I had three people wanting to rent it in less than 24 hours. The agent I’m using sent through a description of each potential tenant with why they wanted to live on the property and how each one would look after it. I found it quite upsetting, I’m guessing it’s people that can afford the £1300 per month needed to rent a flat but don’t have a big enough deposit to buy a place.

I see being a landlord something of a win-win situation these days, unless they’re selling their properties with negative equity (but nobody would because of big demand for rented property). Even if they don’t sell up and even if their profit yields are low, they have assets to do with what they want, ultimately. Just the way it is. I can’t find any stats about landlords selling up but I bet the figure is really low. This country would be screwed without buy to let landlords, it’s not like the building more social housing is a government priority.

I’m sure if more people had the money to become landlords, they would be.

“ no one really needs to own more than one home “
well there wouldn’t be any rentals then would there 🤷‍♀️

Social housing would be a better use of available properties with rent circulating back into the community, not servicing individual aspirations of wealth

I think this country is screwed because of Buy to Let. Not necessarily the individuals who have taken advantage of it to line their pockets, but the policies and depletion of decent social housing stock that allowed it to come to this.

100%

I've got plenty of ire to go around! 🙂

No, very little sympathy here. Landlords do it to make a profit, not from philanthropic motives, and should consider the risks involved beforehand.

We can not build out way out of the demand problem.

Loads and loads of landlords are trying to sell. It takes a while to get the tenants out though as they are all struggling to find somewhere they can afford, so you have to go through the court to get them evicted.

We are selling our second property (not a landlord, we had a relative living there rent free). He has unexpectedly had to vacate.

We looked at renting it out but tbh, I couldn't face the aggro.

There is a massive shortage of rentals where I live. I have no idea what the answer is but I feel it's a crisis in progress.

Zero sympathy. I just don't understand how they think it's OK to play with our lives while we pay the fucking mortgage for them. It's greed, pure and simple. Can't afford it, don't do it. About time there was a properly regulated rental system so we can get shot of these amateurs who ruin people's lives for financial gain.

No sympathy whatsoever.

So what do you think would happen if people were banned from owning a second home that is a rental? How would those unable to buy a place be able to rent? You don’t believe everything would magically turn to affordable social housing, do you?
Or is it better to have all the rentals handled by big property management companies (that are very much profit oriented) rather than an individual private landlord?

Where would the renters live?

I don’t either and I don’t care to hear the “I have one rental left to me, it’s my pension crap”

however it’s a small part of a wider problem- flat wages, lack of house building, lack
of social housing, allowing non U.K. tax paying foreigners to buy up our homes as assets .

There needs to be more social housing built. It’s made a huge different to the rental market around here that one of the HAs has had a huge building project over the last few years.

The vast majority of the shit landlords have been pushed out as there was a lot of choice.

However, we have a teaching hospital so there are a lot of people who want to rent for 6 months, or a couple of years, but don’t want to settle here so there needs to be places for them to rent too.

There was a pilot scheme for a landlord registration that was great, but it’s been pulled as the local authority are only doing the bare minimum they have to because of funding cuts.