To not believe people who claim to think housing is an uncontroversial investment

[PowerfulFishRiver]

Inspired by the wind up thread about the not-quite-millionare, but also a recent conversation with a family member who claimed to be shocked at my strong feelings when they said they wanted to buy a BTL.

I get that people sometimes have to do things that they're not comfortable with because life is tough and often having principles is expensive and sometimes we just can't be the people we want to be. I sometimes do cocaine, fly long-haul, and eat meat, even though I feel deep down like these are all morally wrong. But I would never try to pretend they're morally neutral, especially the drugs.

If someone said they knew treating a home as an investment was wrong, but they literally couldn't see any other way to make enough money to not be in poverty in retirement, or something, I feel like I would have a bit of sympathy.

But I just don't believe people when they claim to believe "it's just a business" or "just an investment". Surely everyone realises there is a finite amount of land on this planet (and especially on this island!), and if someone buys more land/property than they need, they're depriving someone else of it, and therefore making it harder for someone else to have a stable home, which is one of the basic things a human needs to have any sort of wellbeing in their life?

I just can't see how anyone can genuinely think buying up an existing asset and depriving someone else of it is anything like investing in stocks and shares or turning inputs into outputs like an actual productive business does.

But if it’s buy to let you’re renting out to people to live in.

What about if they buy an office and charge rent on that to a company?

strictly speaking it’s land and could be converted into houses?

To be honest, I'd be posting/reflecting on the chaos and harm and families wrecked that have arisen from your need for cocaine, rather than BTL property.

There is a need for a rental market. Not every one can be or wants to be a homeowner.

You can pretend every landlord is a morally dubious human being if you want to. Some of us can see otherwise.

I think the majority of MN won't be able to see past your gak use OP, so your thoughts on BTL will be lost. Anyway, we shall see....

I rent out my flat which is worth a grand total of 60k because it was about 20k in negative equity so I couldn't sell it. I can safely say it's cost me a lot more than it's made me but at least someone has a cheap rental I guess. And I keep it nice and repair/replace immediately (new fridge this month after the tenant accidentally broke the shelf of the old one.) I don't feel morally bankrupt.

I rented for about twelve years. Mostly the rentals were fine and suited me and my various flatmates well. I’m glad there were some landlords viewing their houses/flats as investments who were willing to rent to us, as it enabled us to live in central London without being tied down to a house or each other. Now I own a house I look back on those years with fondness.

YABU. Not everyone wants to be a homeowner aged 21.

But they would prefer a permanent home, rather than one you could take away at any moment? And if you hadn't bought it, they might be able to afford it.

It seems that for a while, housing was an easy way to make an income without any work and the country was awash with slum landlords refusing to fix things and charging a fortune for barely habitable properties, but things are gradually changing for the better and it's becoming less attractive to buy to let.

There's a long way to go before the housing problem is solved.

One of the most ludicrous problems which we have is that all the council houses were sold off in the "right to buy" scheme, and now all the people that bought them and are mortgage free and renting these same council properties at such ridiculously high rents that the occupants have no chance of ever having a right to buy anything.

Policies I'd support would be the government buying up unused houses, a limit to the number of properties someone can own, rent caps, and residency requirements before buying. Half of London is owned by foreign oligarchs as an "investment", currently sitting empty whilst actual Londoners can't live in London anymore.

Surely you can see that lots of people don’t want a permanent home, at least at certain stages of their lives?

My point in mentioning it was that people aren't perfect, and that I'm not saying I am.

We all do things we know are wrong, I just don't understand why people try to pretend they can't see the harm they're doing.

Yanbu op but you'll get shouted down on here because mumsnetters are on average more affluent than the general population and the BTL landlord mumsnetters swoop onto every thread like this to nake sure there's a loud chorus of how important it is to provide rental accommodation.

In most cities there are way more people stuck in rental accommodation desperate to buy but who keep being outbid by BTL landlords than there are people looking to rent. Every time a BTL landlord buys a house they make the problem worse. City councils should assess how many rental properties the local population genuinely needs and should require all btl landlords to buy an annual licence for their property with a ceiling on the number of licences available and you are required to sell within 6 months if you don't get a licence (no individual or company other than social housing landlords allowed more than 3 such licences unless there are spares left after the annual deadline, which can be shared proportionately among applicants). The excess rental stock will have to be sold off relatively cheap to the first time buyer owner-occupiers who were previously priced out.

@AlastheDaffodils
Why would anyone not want a home that they could stay in for as long as they needed to and decorate to their liking?

Nobody would choose to give a random stranger control over what colour their walls were and when they had to move out!

I have asked on countless threads for examples using real life numbers to evidence this

Im yet to see anything that makes sense

Please show your workings.

@CopperWhite but lots and lots of people are stuck renting who don't want to be, and it's landlords who are causing them that suffering.

No, I couldn’t care less. Unless you are prepared to study the inner workings of institutional finances, much of which is hidden despite how much anyone looks; investing in stocks and shares will likely be indirectly investing in property anyway.

Because they could never afford a property on their own in that area so need a rental house share? Because they can’t afford to save enough for a deposit? Because they don’t plan to be in that area for long enough to buy there? Because they are students and only need a short lease?

Not that’s wage stagnation and the increase in house prices

1. Because buying a home takes ages and is stressful and expensive. If you’re planning to move every two years (as I did, and most of my friends, for the first decade of our adult lives) it’s a silly thing to do. The stamp duty alone would have cost a year’s rent.
2. Because when you’re young you don’t know who you’re going to settle down with, if anyone. Buying a flat with your university boyfriend/girlfriend aged 21 is silly, as you’re likely to be broken up within a year or two and then disentangling the ownership is a nightmare, as endless break-up threads on here can attest. Better to rent with friends/a partner and then it’s easy come, easy go.

Basically buying only makes sense if you’re planning to live in the same place, with the same person, for quite a few years to come. That might have been you aged 21, but it wasn’t me.

Obviously if every single BTL landlord sold their property tomorrow, prices would crash, and lots of people who can't currently afford to buy would be able to.

FT minimum wage is £23k, multiply that by 4.5 and you get just over 100k. If the average property price fell to that, the majority of people would be able to buy rather than rent if they wanted to.

@AlastheDaffodils

Stamp duty wouldn't be payable on one bed flats if they fell to a level that most people could afford. And most 21 year olds would want to live on their own, not with a partner.

Show your workings that if every single BTL landlord sold their property, that the average price of property (and you dont seem to be specifying an area or type of property, are you talking about a one bed, 5 bed, detached, 2 up/2down etc etc), would crash to 100k

Quite a lot of assumptions:
most people want to buy
most 21 year olds want to live on their own

Yeah Id worry about sorting that out more than lecturing on somebody having a BTL which still provides housing to people.

Save your venom for the second home owners who leave properties empty for most of the year. Given the new extensions in tenant rights at least BTLs provide homes for people to live in that they can't so easily get chucked out of. It's not as secure and autonomous as social housing or home ownership but it's better than having nowhere to live. Not everyone can afford to buy and without a massive social housing building program (as happened after the 2 WWs) most people won't have access to social housing either.