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.

Yabu

There is a rental crisis

The more people that rent out flats and home, the cheaper the rents will go down and that's better for renters

Not everyone wants to or can buy so they have to be able to rent

Op not everyone wants a permanent home either

My DD is living in her 3rd place in 4 years, as she moves up the career ladder and moves round the country. Should she have to buy somewhere each time? That would be ridiculous. Plus, apart from the estate agents' fees, think of the time involved buying and selling a flat that you were only going to stay in for a year or so.

Maybe if everyone stopped doing the occasional line of cocaine they’d have the money to put down a deposit on a house.

Where are all the students going to go if there are no rentals?

Are you very young OP? You seem to have an incredibly naive outlook!

Many thousands of LL have and are selling up due to the imbalance of responsibilities between LL'S and tenants. House prices have not plummeted as a result.

At the moment there are more applicants for rental than properties - landlords cam be choosy who they let their property to.

There will ALWAYS be plenty of people who prefer to rent or cannot buy, for various reasons.

If all rentals stopped overnight there would be countless numbers absolutely homeless. There aren't enough properties to house everyone here.

Is that what you want? A massive increase in homelessness?

Interesting - suggests a role for government or LA regulation. Planning could be refused if supply of 55+ flats is already more than sufficient for numbers in that demographic. Where I live there are some "McCarthy and Stone" type developments, but also a lot of well off older people living in unsuitably large properties.

It's not a lack of properties that is the reason why older people still live in large family homes. It's the cost of moving, the stress of downsizing and de-cluttering, etc., and so many of them being "past it" and not physically/mentally capable of moving themselves, especially if there are no local family to help them through the process. We live in a similar road where most houses are occupied by elderly couples/widows/widowers but are large 4/5 bedroom family homes. Some simply don't want to move as they've lived there for decades and brought up their families there, etc., so massive emotional attachment. Others just don't want to live in a complex with other "old" people! You can't fit a 4/5 bedroom house contents in a one bed retirement flat, and the thoughts of getting rid of decades of possessions, furniture, etc is just too big a leap for them to undertake! So many old people plan to move "when the time is right" whether to smaller homes or a retirement home, but they never realise "it's the time" until it's too late!

Each to their own. There are worse things to do in life than to buy and rent out a home.🤷‍♀️

Oh I know. My parents are such people. I don't think there's much they could move to if they wanted though. I guess all we can do is try to move earlier ourselves.

Your argument applies to second home ownership but not BTL. Not everyone wants or needs or is able to buy their own home. The rental market is really important to society as well as the economy. If it weren’t rents would be too low to make it worth anyone’s while.

How do you know? As a student the last thing I wanted was a permanent home, I thrived on moving every year with a new group of friends. And then before I moved abroad, I wouldn’t have wanted to tie myself down with a mortgage to have to sell and rebuy when I got back two years later. I also moved into a rental with now DH after a year of being together. It would have been absurd to buy together at that point in our relationship. Even more absurd if I’d bought with my ex boyfriend as we only lived together a year (in a rental) before splitting up. And then when DH and I moved to a new city, we bought in a totally different area to our rental after we got a feel for the place - I’m glad we weren’t tied to where we originally chose. My friend could afford to buy, but is rubbish at DIY and so activitely chooses to rent where all of those problems are her landlords responsibility.

There is a place for landlords, some renters actually want to be renting.

I think this is more a problem of British housing policy than moral bankruptcy. It goes quite far back.

I do think we need to tax assets more and tax work less.

There isnt actually a shortage of homes, there is a shortage of affordable homes

So people who may be able to afford a mortgage, might not be able to get one for a myriad of reasons
People who can afford to rent need a guarantor, a barrier to renting privately but theres no social housing
People who cant afford to rent privately, but cant access social housing, get further and further into debt
People who are privately renting usually dont have enough to go round to save up a deposit for a purchase if thats what they actually want
Private rentals usually are hard to get and you can easily 'fail' the criteria. Private landlords also dont like pets most of the time

There simply isnt enough small housing and social housing. We need rentals that dont require massive deposits, dont require a guarantor and that are pitched at the same rate as the LHA in case someone needs benefits. We need for people to be able to have gardens and have pets and also for them to remain living in a consistent area for health and education needs to be met.

This. However I can see two arguments against it

1. It creates a rentier class within the working and middle classes whose interests are opposed to the majority of single home owners and renters

1. It upsets people as our entire system is based on people owning wealth earning more wealth from people who have none and BTL is the lowest rung of this

my student kids wanted to rent flats in their University cities. They certainly didn’t want to buy there.

my Polish colleague wants to go back to Poland and not buy here. He would like to rent for a year.

I don’t fully understand it but people are saying than there will be fewer landlords with all the changes coming. Won’t that push private rents up?

Exactly. People seem to forget that are are a large group of people in their early 20s, students and young workers, who actually want affordable rental properties, zero hour contracts etc. There needs to be good options for people who want permanency but also people who want to move around.

Many people need rental housing e.g. due to poor credit, needing to live temporarily in an area, not having a large deposit and so on.

I have a BTL and its housed the same family in it for seven years. Over those years the rental market has shot up but I've kept their rent fair and am probably charging them between £150 - £200 below market value. All repairs are sorted quickly. If they want to buy their own house, they have had 7 years in which to save a deposit for it, but presumably they are happy and settled renting and the situation works for them.

Its incredible isnt it the short sightedness

There is this mythical magical thinking that all the landlords are going sell up and then the people living in them will just buy them and house prices will crash to around 100k all over the place. Ignoring the fact that people will just hold on to their asset until prices rise anyway

Ive also seen on other threads about this, people who are generally anti landlord, making the distinction between the general accidental or singular landlord, perhaps they are someone just renting out a property because they have one or two and they are wholly hated. But then the distinction is made between them and 'landlord businesses' as if the landlord businesses and companies and organisations are somehow preferable and deemed permitted and ok and somehow morally acceptable compared to Mrs Goggins down the road who has a couple of flats she lets out to pay her pension income

I can tell you now that those big rental companies will be hell to deal with, wont have the same flexibility or knowledge of their tenants and neither will they care. There will be a lot less transparency about how or why you werent chosen to rent that property and I think people on benefits will be the most disadvantaged.

Yep. I am happy to have investments but could never have a home as an investment. I would feel very uncomfortable at ever being a landlord. Especially with the housing crisis we have. Make it hard for individuals to own their own home because they are paying my mortgage makes me very uncomfortable.

I get that landlords are a necessary evil and have no issue with accidental landlord with one property. But I could never be one.

We have a cost of living crisis yet lost of us will have investments in utilities, big supermarket conglomerates. So literally food and water and heat, the real basics needed to survive are being 'invested in'

Anyone who has a work or private pension is involved in this.

Many also have property portfolios within the investment package.

Which is nothing like me making an individual pay my mortgage and pay me a profit while this erodes their ability to save for a house deposit. I couldn’t do it.

Providing capital to a company at least
allows them to grow. But as I said I get landlords are a necessary evil. We will always need rentals. I could just never be one. I view properties as primarily a form of shelter. Not for me to make money.

We have a capitalist economy, everything is there to make money, even health services.

How that regulated and managed, thats a different matter but I dont agree that there is something intrinsically wrong or immoral to be a landlord.

Where I live I've just looked on RM and found over 70 houses under £250k. Some have been on the market for over 7 months. There are plenty of houses for people to buy. They don't not buy because LL have bought them all up. They don't buy because either they don't have a deposit, can't pass bank stress tests, don't earn enough to get big enough multipliers or they don't want to buy and prefer to rent. If a LL buys one of these houses it makes absolutely no difference to prospective home buyers. Yet another LL bashing thread.