Lots of Landlords are selling up!!

[PassingStranger]

Where is everyone going to live who can't afford to buy?

Alot of landlords are selling. Can't be bothered with all the hassle now.
People aren't paying rent and also trashing houses when they do and costing the owners lots of money to put things right.
On TikTok people are being told to trash houses. [Society gone downhill]

I know there are good tenants, but there are alot of bad ones. Family member works for estate agent and says there are more bad tenants than landlords.

You can trash a house and walk away. Nobody ever gets done for criminal damage on private rents.
There is no register of bad tenants legally allowed either. It's all left to the landlord to sort out at their expense.

Where is all the housing going to come from?
The government donthave enough.
People who are trashing houses and not paying rent are actually spoiling it for everyone..
Alot of lls are selling up now.

They're selling up because house prices are extremely high. Now is a good time to sell.
Renting out property is a lot of hassle and is not at all as lucrative as it once was.

Just as many terrible landlords as terrible tenants. Fault on both sides, which gives good LLs and tenants a bad name.
Some are selling up, some are still buying, some homes will be bought by private individuals. I do agree that the poorest renters will be ones to suffer the most, as usual.

The current system is set up to reward bad tenants and punish good tenants. And virtually the same for landlords.

It’s still not correct to say landlords are paying tax on turnover.

Taxpayers are not able to deduct finance costs but claim a 20% tax credit instead. So yes, if they pay tax at a higher rate than 20%, they may have to pay tax when in reality they have made a loss.. I don’t think I said otherwise.

They can still deduct other expenses relating to the rental property. There’s also the property allowance if their expenses are less than £1k.

Yes, that just about sums it up.

I know landlords with huge portfolios, they have moved offshore to a tax free country so they can sell their properties. They will do the 5 years and then come back with their tax free money. Fortunately we have our properties in a company but we are thinking of switching to commercial as it's much easier.

Airbnb is restricted in many areas. In London it's banned outright for properties which aren't owner-occupied. These must be licensed and the licence prohibits all short term lets. Well that's the case in Newham at least, so I'm guessing the other boroughs are the same. And there is a London wide ban for all properties being let on a short term basis for more than three months a year.

I can imagine, hence I said ‘for many of us’.

There are no restrictions where I live, in Surrey.

No she was not, just given a sect 21 nor given the option of the option of a rent increase either, her rent wasn't high but neither was it anywhere near the low end either, its just that the houses available atm are in better areas, command higher rents.

Of course it may have been total coincidence, she is still paying the rent but cannot leave as she has no where to go, so will await the courts, its extremely streesful and why it was stupid beyond belief to out source social housing to the private sector.

I guess the proof will be in the pudding, if Labour cock this up, it'll have huge implications and ones that cannot be fixed either.

Direct line offer rent insurance and are not as strict as homelet etc.

@thecatneuterer We advertised via OpenRent and then bought the landlord insurance via their site. We've made a claim for 'home emergency' and they were very good. We've not had to make any claims for unpaid rent.

If you use OpenRent there is the option for them to collect the rent each month which costs £10 a month. If the tenants fail to pay, they start chasing for payment.

The houses will still be there, they'll just have different owners thats all

This..
demand will drop and affordability will improve as property values will be more linked to wages as opposed to rental yields. A layer of people who currently rent will afford to buy, leaving fewer renters competing over the remaining rental properties.

It is not a bad thing.

You're taking a qualitative expectation:
"demand will drop and affordability will improve"

but not thinking about it quantitatively:
"How much will house prices drop? How do we know that? Will that be low enough for the equivalent number of people who are no longer renting to be able to buy?"

pp have suggested a house price drop of 10% - and that this wouldn't be enough for a significant number of people to buy. I don't know what that's based on though.

There will also almost certainly be a drop in available housing.

The transaction cost of buying and selling is very high - especially in the SE, where stamp duty can be £30k for a very ordinary family home.

A hostile environment for private landlords will mean that some people leave homes empty instead of renting them out. Eg

• people moving for work for a year or two. They get a work allowance for accomodation, but would previously have rented their home out as an extra
• people who inherit a home, and aren't sure what to do with it for a few years: they might move there when they retire, or their kids might use it when they're grown. Maybe. So they hang into it.

Even with the exceptionally high cost of buying/selling houses, those decisions might not make financial sense... but houses are a bit special. People sometimes make an emotional decision about eg whether to hold onto their childhood home for a few years, rather than make the very best financial choice.

The new high rise blocks near us have just been released for rental only. The towers are appx 32 floors each, ugly brown things. A one bed is £2400 a month and the two bed is £2900 a month...but hey....you get to use the roof terrace and can book an onsite function room for a special event and its only a 30 second walk to the Victoria line station which already struggles and is often shut due to over crowding !! These are owned by a Canadian pension fund.

This is the problem with looking only at the houses themselves within the house building target. The whole infrastructure needs to expand with it: public transport, road network, shops, doctors/dentists, schools (not everywhere, depending on demographic change). The health impacts of the extra noise and overcrowding stress.

It does actually come back to the problem of immigration currently being far too much, too fast. Politicians only look at immediate employment, not at what that extra population actually means for the UK.

It has to come down urgently and be targetted much more carefully. And in parallel, we need urgent investment and structural changes in training/recruitment/employment inventives, in order to build our own capacity and break our huge and unsustainable dependency on importing NHS and other staff.

There's never a simple answer.

@strawberrybubblegum agree with the infrastructure.
Building massive estates on the edges of towns and villages is a disaster. The roads never cope and with no infrastructure of course everyone has to leave the housing sprawl to do anything.

Over the last 10 years there has been huge numbers of new houses built in our immediate area (which pushed us out of catchment for a decent school). There must be literally thousands more people living here but not 1 new school or GP surgery has been built.

I don’t have the mental gymnastic capabilities to feel sorry for landlords, but it’s all moving deckchairs on the titanic anyway. No serious conversation about the housing crisis can reach any conclusion other than: build way more houses and complimentary infrastructure, and stop being scared of NIMBYs.

And reduce immigration.

1 million net in a year is unsustainable. Looks like it might be coming down but I won't believe it until final figures are in... previous ones were revised up from 700k to 1 million.

Even if we had the builders available to build the new schools and Dr surgeries would we have the teachers and doctors to work in them?

A hostile environment for private landlords will mean that some people leave homes empty instead of renting them out
Leaving a property empty is a risky strategy if prices start dropping. Better to sell as soon as possible while you can, surely?

Not about feeling sorry for LLs, its about how to provide housing for people who will never be able to buy a house of their own.

ATM and for the foreseeable future, there is no alternative to private renting, take away private LLs and millions of people will be left in limbo.

2.8m private LLs in the UK & a further 326k people in temporary accommodation, so even if Labour built 1.5 council houses, they plan on a few 100 thousand "affordable to buy and to rent" we still need over 2m private LLs.

In other words: be more ambitious and build even more.

Some landlords price themselves out. I own my house. Live next door to same house which is rented out for last 15 years. 2 good tenants in that time. Both complained that repairs were never done. Ll put rent up again three months ago. Tenants showed photos of leaking bathroom shower ext. Put in long ago. Ll says he can't afford replacement. Tenants left recently. Have a mortgage on a similar, but newer property for £100 a month less than they were paying in rent. The owners of rented property have been told that they will need to do extensive repairs/updating of kitchen bathroom before they would be able to rent or sell so will now lie empty for several weeks. Tenants have got their deposit back. None of the repairs/updating needed were of their making. On the other hand I have relatives who repair within a couple of days of tenants raising an issue in their rented property. Same tenants for 20 years. The house is paid for. Rent high percentage of profit plus they have an up to date paid for property to sell if they needed to. As a land lord you have to factor in occasional bad tenants just like any business has to factor in some bad deptors. Then give a good service and in general enjoy a good level of profit. Land lords arn't in it to solve the housing crisis they are in it to get profit from their owned asset ...which is fine. Like any business, in general you have to put the work and money in to maximize profit margins.